Out of the closet? Reconstructing the personal life of pioneering sex researcher Katharine Bement Davis

Abstract

Katharine B. Davis was an important progressive‐era figure, a pioneering professional, an innovative penologist, and an iconoclastic sexologist. Although scholars have long been aware of Davis's tolerant attitude toward same‐sex relationships at the New York State Female Reformatory at Bedford Hills, where she was Superintendent from 1901 to 1913, and her open discussion of same‐sex attraction in her study of “normal” women's sexuality, published in 1929, little has been known about Davis's personal life. Thus, it was a feminist biographer's dream come true to gain access to what Davis called her “autobiographical biography,” the never‐finished, never‐published, story of her life. Or so I thought. As it turns out, my quest to understand Davis's personal life and how it informed her professional trajectory has been a bit more complicated.