I was recently doing research at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. I was looking at documents related to the military’s venereal-disease prevention efforts during World War I. Here’s the funniest document I found:
The more I work on this subject of venereal disease prevention the more I am impressed with what seems to me to be the fact that a considerable number of women indulge in sexual intercourse for the same reasons that men do, for the pleasure and excitement that they get from it. Happily, the number of them is very much less than the number of men who do so.
That’s from a letter dated Dec. 30, 1919, from Colonel P.M. Andrews, Colonel, Medical Corps, to Dr. Charles L. Miller of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the Surgeon General’s Office General Correspondence, 1917–1927, Record Group 112, Box 421.