The sex lives of modern women ... fifty years on

FIFTY years ago Mary McCarthy’s novel shed light on http://exa.mn/mv. It shocked readers then, but today it seems almost tame.

When McCarthy published The Group in Aug 1963, just six months after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, it painted a very different picture of the women of that generation.

The fictional group of eight best friends — graduates of Vassar College’s class of 1933, McCarthy’s own alma mater and graduating class — would have come of age right before Friedan’s peers from Smith College. Unlike the stifled housewives of Westchester, the women of McCarthy’s novel are trailblazers professionally, but most memorably, sexually. From love affairs to contraception to masturbation, sex drives the narrative of their fictional lives.