The writer who chronicled women’s sexual fantasies

In 1973, Nancy Friday opened up a new front in the sexual revolution. Her book My Secret Garden documented the erotic daydreams of everyday women, a topic previously considered taboo. The work, based on hundreds of interviews, sold more than 2 million copies and established Friday as the talk-show circuit’s go-to interpreter of the female libido. “Men spend a great deal of their leisure hours in pubs, clubs, or washrooms talking about their sexual exploits, but women don’t say anything at all,” said Friday. “Consequently one woman never knows what another woman thinks about sex.” Born to a teenage mother in Pittsburgh, Friday grew up without a father, said The Washington Post. “There is nothing like the mystery of an absent father,” she later wrote, “to addict you to the loving gaze of men.” A graduate of Wellesley College, she was living in London and writing dating columns for Cosmopolitan when she placed classified ads in magazines and newspapers, asking women to send in their sexual fantasies. The hundreds of responses formed the basis of My Secret Garden. Other works of pop psychology followed, including My Mother/ My Self, which “argued that women inherit many of their anxieties and insecurities from their mothers.” Friday’s sex-positivism led her to clash “with those feminists who saw the main battle in politics and economics,” said the Financial Times. She responded by labeling feminists as “anti-sex and anti-men.” Others dismissed her research and analysis as unscientific, criticisms she shrugged off. “If you’re trying to understand human behavior,” Friday said, “you have to choose between being a scientist or being a writer. I’d rather have the freedom of being a writer.”