What comes to mind when you picture Victorian-era sex? Corsets? Marriages of convenience and social bartering? Repression? Maybe, like, a lot of repression?Turns out, how we view that time in sexual history might be more than a little warped. We can start to get a better idea of what women of the time really thought about sex by looking at the work of Clelia Duel Mosher, MD. Years before Alfred Kinsey was even born, Dr. Mosher was already researching and discussing the sexual tendencies of Victorian-era women. (This, it should be noted, is in addition to her research that proved women breathe from the diaphragm , just like men, and that it was the corset and a lack of exercise that was to blame for many women's health issues.)Her sexual survey work started in the 1890s and spanned 20 years, during which time she talked to 45 women at length about their sexual habits and preferences, from how often they had an orgasm to whether they experienced lust independent of their male partners (Spoiler alert: They totally did).Unfortunately, the report was never published in Dr. Mosher's lifetime. It's only thanks to Carl Degler , an author, professor, and historian, that we know of it at all. He stumbled upon Dr. Mosher's papers in Stanford University's archives in 1973 and published an analysis of her findings the following year.As others have noted , Dr. Mosher's research has played a major role in changing how historians think of Victorian attitudes around sex. Then, like today, a variety of perspectives on the subject existed. While this one report doesn't sum up everything there is to know about how people had sex at this time, it certainly deepens our understanding of Victorian women, who are all too often painted in broad strokes at best.Below, we've listed some of the most interesting findings from Dr. Mosher's groundbreaking survey.