A number of the early female writers on sexual matters were mainly concerned with a specific measure, e.g. Margaret Sanger wrote on birth control. It can be argued that such a preoccupation, though praiseworthy, is not strictly sexological in nature.

The first woman sexologist in the true sense was Katherine Davis who performed a detailed questionnaire study of 2,200 women in the New York area which was published in 1929 ("Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women") The questionnaire was originally mailed to 20,000 women, only a tenth choosing to reply. The survey was said to be confined to "normal" women of good standing in the community, most of whom were graduates. The ages of the women, many of them teachers, ranged between 25 and 55. The treatment of the data has been represented by Kinsey as "simple but statistical".

(A much smaller study, perhaps justifying the adjective sexological, was carried out by Anita Newcomb McGee from 1888 to 1891; interviews were taken and data compiled with respect to the famous Oneida Community in New York.) At the Oneida Community sex was a free-for-all, but men practised 'male continence'.

Ref: Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women. Katherine Bement Davis, Ph.D. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1929.