The Sexologist Who Taught Us How to Talk About Women’s Orgasms

Born Shirley Diana Gregory in St. Joseph, Missouri, on November 2, 1942, she was the illegitimate daughter of a teenage girl, also named Shirley, and an Army draftee who was permanently shipped out. Shirley dropped off her firstborn child with her fundamentalist Christian parents. They divorced in 1948, and in 1951 the grown-up Shirley, now married to Raymond Hite and carrying a second child, returned. A year later, “unable to cope,” she brought the child – now renamed Shere Hite, in honor of her stepfather – to St. Joseph. (Shere is usually pronounced “share.”) Big Shirley returned for exactly one visit, largely notable for the fact that Hite nearly drowned in a public swimming pool while her mother flirted with the men there. Then Shirley disappeared from her daughter’s life; she was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital and was later transferred in and out of institutions. Hite seems to have seen her only once, decades later.

Campbell and documentary filmmaker Nicole Newnham, who directed The disappearance of Shere Hite, a 2023 documentary biography of the sexologist’s life and work, agree on more than the arguable claim that Hite and her work have disappeared. Both infer that her courage, independence, and sexual nonconformity were a consequence of her childhood resilience in the face of persistent social shame and family chaos. Around 13, Hite realized that she was beautiful. When she first started having sex, her grandmother couldn’t tolerate it, warning her that boys “only marry the good guys.” Eventually, Hite was exiled to Daytona Beach, Florida, to live with an aunt and uncle who, in a happy twist, provided him with a kinder, more normal middle-class childhood. Their expectations were that Hite would “date and be popular”, and she complied, becoming a cheerleader and being nominated for prom queen.

Besides kindness, Hite’s aunt and uncle gave her an even greater gift: the security and comfort of reading, of understanding that she was intelligent, and of dreaming of a cultured and sophisticated life. Earning a master’s degree in history from Columbia University, Hite was accepted into a doctoral program at Columbia University to study intellectual and cultural history with Jacques Barzun. During her first meeting with the professor, Barzun belittled her by telling her that her master’s thesis must be plagiarized because he was “absolutely sure they didn’t have most of these books at the University of Florida.”