(1961) The Chapman Report Read Free Page A

and would make her sexually suspect. So she had resisted no longer and had decided to bide her time.
    Now, hastily lighting another cigarette, she was confronted with the damnable folder. She removed the list of names to examine the sheet of paper beneath it. This was a mimeographed publicity story -dated the following day “for immediate press release”-and it was signed by Grace Waterton. This release, Grace had explained, would give Kathleen all of the pertinent facts when she was telephoning to notify members of the special meeting two days hence. Dragging steadily at her cigarette, Kathleen read the press release.
    “On Friday morning, May 22, at ten-thirty o’clock,” the mimeographed story began, “Dr. George G. Chapman, world-renowned sex authority from Reardon College in Wisconsin and author of last year’s bestselling A Sex Study of the American Bachelor, will address a full membership meeting of The Briars’ Women’s Association. For two weeks following the meeting, at which Dr. Chapman will discuss the purposes of his current study of the married female, Dr. Chapman and his team of assistants, Dr. Horace Van Duesen, Mr. Cass Miller, Mr. Paul Radford, all associated with Reardon College, will interview the members of the Women’s Association who are, or have been, married.
    “For fourteen months, the celebrated Dr. Chapman and his team have been traveling through the United States interviewing several thousand married women of widely varied educational backgrounds who represent every economic, religious, and age group. According to Dr. Chapman, the women of The Briars will be the last that he and his associates will interview before collating their findings and publishing them next year. “The purpose of this inquiry,’ says Dr. Chapman, ‘is to bring into the open what has so long been hidden, the true pattern of the sexual life of American females, so that, through statistics, we may scientifically illuminate an area of human life long kept in darkness and ignorance. It is our hope that future generations of American women may profit by our findings.’
    “Mrs. Grace Waterton, president of The Briars’ Women’s Association, has already expressed her awareness of the honor in a telegram to Dr. Chapman and promised a one hundred per cent turnout at his briefing lecture. Subjects will offer themselves for interview on a voluntary basis, but Mrs. Waterton predicts that after
    hearing Dr. Chapman, and learning that the actual personal interviews are even more anonymous than those in the past conducted by such pioneer investigators as Gilbert Hamilton, Alfred Kinsey, Ernest Burgess, Paul Wallin, few of the Association’s 220 married members will refuse this opportunity to contribute to scientific advancement. The Association, which has its own club house and auditorium in The Briars, was established fifteen years ago and is dedicated to social and charitable works, as well as to beautifying the western area of greater Los Angeles.”
    Having finished reading the release, Kathleen continued to gaze at it with distaste. Irrationally offended by the words, she asked herself: What kind of Peeping Tom is this Dr. Chapman anyway?
    She had heard of him, of course. Everyone had heard of him. The sensationalism of his last book (all the women she knew had read it avidly, though Kathleen had disdained even to borrow a copy), and the progress of his current study, so-called, had enlivened the pages of newspapers and periodicals for several years and had served to bring his portrait to the covers of at least a dozen magazines. One day, she supposed, Chapman would be a freak symbol of his decade and its obsessive concern with sex, just as Emile Coue was representative of a different curiosity in the nineteen-twenties.
    But what, Kathleen wondered, would make a grown, educated man want to devote his life to prying into the secret sex histories of
    men, women, and children? The unceasing persiflage about