Mary Jane Sherfey MD
Sherfey’s position consists of three major theses: first, that the early embryo of all human beings is female; second, that by the nature of their physiological structure women are sexually insatiable; and third, that civilization arose as a means of suppressing the inordinate demands of female sexuality that result from its inherent insatiability.
(1918–1983) was an American psychiatrist and writer on female sexuality, she received her medical degree from Indiana University, where she attended lectures on marriage and sexuality given by Alfred Kinsey.
Sherfey had a private practice in New York City and was on the staff of the Payne Whitney Clinic of the New York Hospital – Cornell Medical Center.
In 1961, Sherfey’s interest in female biology was intensified when she came upon the inductor theory, which demonstrated that the human embryo is female until hormonally “induced” to become male. Determined to popularize a fact that had lain in neglect since its discovery in the 1950s, Sherfey began researching the subject and familiarizing herself with a variety of disciplines, including embryology, anatomy, primatology and anthropology. Many of her findings appear in The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality, which initially took form as an article contesting the existence of vaginal orgasm, published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1966.[1]
In her earlier works, Sherfey noted that “the strength of the sex drive determines the force required to suppress it.” In The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality, she introduced the concept that “female sexuality was an insatiable drive that had been repressed for the sake of maintaining a civilized agrarian society” and helped to explain why knowledge of the clitoris had been ignored or forbidden for over three hundred years.[2]
Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey, a psychiatrist and writer on female sexuality, died of a heart attack Feb. 20 at her home in Rusk, Tex. She was 65 years old.
Dr. Sherfey, who had been a psychiatrist in New York for many years and a member of the staff at the Payne Whitney Clinic of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, was a resident psychiatrist at Rusk State Hospital at her death. Dr. Sherfey joined the hospital in September 1981 after working as medical director of the Sabine Valley Mental Health and Mental Retardation Center in Longview, Tex.
She wrote many articles on female sexuality and was the author of ”The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality,” published in 1972. Dr. Sherfey, a native of Brazil, Ind., received her bachelor’s and medical degrees from Indiana University. She had also been an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Cornell University Medical School.
Surviving are three sisters, Helen Sherfey of Terre Haute, Ind.; Blanche Frazier of Brevard, N.C., and Caroline Bowles of Flint, Tex., and two brothers, Joseph, of Manhattan, and William, of Danville, Ind.
In these days of sexual politics it becomes necessary to separate the scientific study of female sexuality from its misuse by theorists who wish to establish strategic positions in the struggle between the sexes. For this reason, and because her ideas have already assumed importance within the women’s liberation movement, one cannot ignore Mary Jane Sherfey’s The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality.
Dr. Sherfey is a New York psychiatrist whose research originated with an interest in premenstrual tension but now extends into many other fields. Her book is mainly the reprint of a long and very technical article which appeared in 1966 in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. A later issue of that journal was largely devoted to papers by fellow psychiatrists who attacked many aspects of Sherfey’s argument. Marcel Heiman, clinical professor of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, went so far as to conclude that “Sherfey has completely misunderstood and misinterpreted the facts established by embryology.”1 Others documented her “inconsistencies” and lack of scientific objectivity.”
In reprinting the article, Sherfey answers none of these criticisms; and in the brief introduction that now precedes the original text she merely informs us that letters of congratulation “came pouring in with each mail delivery,” that to this day she has a “special stack…from people you would call the ‘big names’ in psychiatry,” and that “there was not one letter denouncing the article or arguing with its chief propositions.”
Sherfey’s position consists of three major theses: first, that the early embryo of all human beings is female; second, that by the nature of their physiological structure women are sexually insatiable; and third, that civilization arose as a means of suppressing the inordinate demands of female sexuality that result from its inherent insatiability.
The first of these theses challenges the Freudian belief in an embryo that is sexually undifferentiated and therefore bisexual. The question is important in psychoanalytic theory because Freud assumed that the clitoris served as a residual organ of the masculine element in women, and that this condition interfered with the development of vaginal interests which he considered to be “normal” in mature females. Against this, Sherfey asserts that “the early embryo is not undifferentiated; ‘it’ is a female.” She argues that without a great deal of androgen after the first five or six weeks no embryo would become a male, but that the female does not require additional hormones of any sort. She presents us with the image of a female development in the early embryology of all human beings, who would continue to be females if the androgen bath did not deflect some of them into becoming males.
But it is only by a crude sleight-of-hand that one could reach Sherfey’s conclusion. Genetic or chromosomal sex is determined at the moment of fertilization; and while it is true that male embryos develop as they do because of the androgen bath during the fifth or sixth week, whereas females require a lack of…
This book is an economic and intellectual rip-off. Good was served by the appearance of the original paper. It challenged the psychoanalytic theorist with facts from the Masters and Johnson research that went to the core of female sexuality, notably the maturational transfer from clitoral to vaginal orgasm. It challenged the male oriented biblical theory of genesis with laboratory evidence that the basic mammalian form is not male. Dr. Sherfey’s literary style does have its moments of flair however. Some of her writing could add much to contemporary pornography. On a single page her use of metaphor in describing the anatomy of the penis is just short of spurting: the corpora cavernosa is likened to a “double-barreled ramrod” that can render the penis “as hard as a rock in an instant”. Book’s scholarly quality is not of the former, and its political activist energy is not of the latter. From the historical vantage point, the ultimate review of all written work, therein lies its greatest fault.