Georgia O’Keeffe — Hand (1918) | Alfred Stieglitz/ Art Institute Chicago / CC0
Shere Hite’s goal was to bring feminism to the women in the suburbs she grew up in. To her conservative Christian grandmother who raised her; to her mother who fell pregnant with Hite as a teenager and was forced out of school; and to herself—an aspiring feminist academic who, without financial support, turned to modeling and eventually porn for income. In an effort to find solace, she drafted a questionnaire for women, asking them about their sex lives and orgasms, and sent it out across the United States. The thousands of responses she received were compiled to create The Hite Report (1976).
The Hite Report sold over 50 million copies and introduced women to a politicization of sex that hadn’t been seen before. Hite questioned the ways women have sex with men, the taboos of sex, and more specifically, the lack of female orgasms through penetration. But her research came crumbling down during the Reagan administration, as conservatism suppressed feminist leaders and the media began to dogpile her work.
Fifty years after The Hite Report’s release, feminist scholar Rosa Campbell reintroduces Hite to the modern era through The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report (Melville House, 2026). Campbell is currently a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow at King’s College London, with previous work published in Literary Hub, The White Review, and The Independent, among other outlets. In an interview with Rachel Potter, Campbell grapples with the loss of Hite in popular culture and asks, “How can we bring her back to life?” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rachel Potter: When did you first encounter Shere Hite’s work, and what made you think she would be a good center to write a book around?
Rosa Campbell: I first read The Hite Report when I was 10 because my parents had a copy, and they were 1970s radicals—labor organizers, unionists, feminists, socialists. I guess they were trying to do things differently compared to their own repressive upbringings, so they allowed me to read it. I think we all agree now that it was too young, but I realized as I was reading the archive that many others had read the book as children too. A lot of other people who wrote to Shere were showing their children The Joy of Sex (Crown, 1972) and The Hite Report. It was definitely the first feminist book I ever read, and it was definitely the first book I ever read that was so explicit about sex, so it always sort of stayed with me.
When I was doing my PhD, I realized that I had never heard it mentioned, so I got curious. The book is so odd. It’s not a women’s liberation manifesto. It’s not a collection of poetry. It’s not the usual way that the movement communicates. It’s a social science report. It sold 50 million copies, and it’s this really strange book. Then I found out that there were 280 boxes of material from Shere’s personal archive at Harvard. I was just like, “This is such a good story, why has nobody worked on her?” And so I got really intrigued and obsessed.
Potter: What was it like going through the archive and parsing through all the letters?
Campbell: Grand. The Schlesinger Library is such a treasure trove. The archivist shepherded those archives so beautifully. I asked for the letters from the men and readers to be opened because the material in them is so personal. They are really what made the book possible because those archives of letters are such gold dust. There are so many quirky things in them, like what people choose to write on, their choice of pen, the stationery that they use. I noticed that I was able to get through letters from men quite quickly compared to the letters from women because they were typically written on typewriters. But the women’s letters were incredible in the way that they all felt like Shere had made them feel normal.
Potter: Shere was a very extravagant woman in both her style and how she presented herself to the world but also her emotions, and you portray this picture of her through the book. I began to connect with and get very emotional for her. But you also bring up her ignorance, such as how her research didn’t really include race or class. How did you grapple with that when deciding how to present Shere?
Campbell: I sometimes feel like the way that feminists are treated is with real ungenerosity, as opposed to the way that we think about great male thinkers. That to me was key to contextualizing Shere and why she was the way that she was. I’m aware that I’m a white writer and a white woman who is a feminist and that I may have similar blind spots that Shere had, which means I need to hold her and myself accountable. She did make mistakes. Some of her feminism was imperialist. But I also had to imagine who’s reading the book and how they’ll see the way that I’ve treated Shere and whether I’ve held her accountable for her political flaws and her lack of intersectionality and attention to Black women’s perspectives on sex. I really tried to say, if we just dismiss her, we also miss Black women’s own engagement with the Hite Report. [Shere] says for sex to be pleasurable, the world has to change and become more equal and liberated, from a feminist perspective. And [Black women] say, Yes, and it also has to change and become an anti-racist world.
Potter: You also integrate current political events that are influencing us and trace it back to the work that Shere did, like how conservatives during the Reagan era came down on her and changed the direction feminism was going.
Campbell: I was taught to be really, really careful about making parallels between the past and the present. The problem with that is if you do, what you see is a continual present. You end up missing so much, because so many things were very weird and odd and different about the past. So I went into this book cautious about making those parallels. But I think my great editor at Melville House, Michelle Capone, really pushed me to find those parallels because they were so resonant. I think there are big differences between Shere’s time and our time, but I also think that there are things which I saw in the archives that help us to navigate our times now. For example: the collection of letters that I didn’t expect from men. It really challenges that history as well, which says women’s liberation was a movement for women, that men either ignored it at best or were hostile to it at worst. Well, there’s a whole archive and swath of letters that show us that, actually, that’s not the case.
Potter: Shere came under attack from conservatives for her perspectives, which feels resonant now when women’s rights are actively being dismantled again.
Campbell: There are so many resonances between our time and Shere’s. There are real resonances with the way that women speak out against the entanglement of sex and power and the way they’re treated today. And we see this, for example, with the Epstein survivors and victims of Cesar Chavez. I think that women still get punished for talking about how sex is political, that it’s impacted by the inequalities beyond the bedroom. Of course it’s a site of pleasure, but it’s also often used as a tool of abuse for men to accrue power over women. I think people who challenge that liberal idea of free choice and the ideas of autonomy and politics within our sex lives, which Shere did, get treated very badly. Despite the #MeToo movement, it’s never been a more precarious, difficult, or dangerous time to call out a man with power about sexual abuse.
There is a parallel between the 80s and now with the backlash against #MeToo, Black Lives Matter (BLM), and trans rights. This current discourse against feminism and trans rights is expressed through the patriarchal idea of natural biological difference. Grievance politics also plays a bit role here. Saying that the majority of Americans have been left behind by BLM or #MeToo mirrors the idea that civil rights and feminism left ordinary Americans behind. The year 1980 is particularly important because it’s when more than 50 percent of married women worked, more women were enrolled in college than men, and it’s the same year that no new manufacturing jobs were created. Men were really confused, and dating norms seemed really different. These feelings hardened into hostility and a sense of grievance that they’re losing out and that feminism is to blame. Does that sound familiar?
Potter: You’re able to incorporate this knowledge and your opinions into the book in a way that prevents it from feeling like a dense historical text.
Campbell: I wanted to do it in a way that was really controlled. Sometimes you read books and it’s like, This person is just showing off about their life, and I find that really off-putting. There are a few times when writing where I’ve noticed there wasn’t enough control or there was too much self for the sake of the self, rather than for the sake of the story or for the sake of Shere or the sake of the history of Shere. But because I was also making those parallels between the past and the present or thinking about how this book and Shere resonates now, I felt more at liberty not to put what I thought in the background but to really bring it out.
Potter: Overall, how has Shere influenced modern feminism?
Campbell: She’s the one who broke the story that sex was not just a private affair between two people. She taught us that sex is political and that it’s impacted by structures that exist outside the bedroom. Feminists had an idea about that, but they weren’t super open about what they actually did in bed. But Shere took that to a mainstream audience; she centered women’s pleasure.
One of the really interesting things is the way that she integrated lesbian women. It’s not actually super radical today, but in 1976 that was a very radical thing for Shere to do, to bring that to Midwestern women and men working in the Ford factory, who were some of the people who read her book. She says that straight women can learn from lesbian sexuality or bisexuality—not to become lesbians but to learn how to have sex like lesbians. If people are experiencing sexual stuckness or sexual difficulties, I would take a leaf out of Shere’s book and say: You should read some books that are written by queer and trans people about their sex lives and how they have sex and how they negotiate sex—not to become queer or trans but to learn how sex can look outside of these rigid heterosexual scripts.
Click here to read an excerpt from The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report by Rosa Campbell.
