Pioneering sex researcher
ST. LOUIS - Virginia Johnson, the Missouri farm girl who helped redefine the understanding of human sexuality as half of the husband-wife team whose taboo sex studies in the 1960s turned them into worldwide celebrities and best-selling authors, has died. She was 88.
The pioneering sex researcher died Wednesday at an assisted-living facility in St. Louis after suffering complications from various illnesses, her son Scott Johnson said Thursday.
Johnson was in her 30s, a twice-divorced mother of two, when she went job hunting at Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1950s, seeking work to support her young family while she pursued a college degree.
She was hired as a secretary at the university’s medical school but soon becamethe assistant and lover of obstetrician-gynecologist William Masters, then collaborated on a large-scale human-sexuality experiment - a subject all but taboo at the time.
The couple became known for a revolutionary sexual therapy that drew couples from across the country with sexual dysfunction, including celebrities, to St. Louis for their two-week program.
That research was later discussed in the pair’s 1966 book, Human Sexual Response. And their 1970 book, Human Sexual Inadequacy, explored a therapy they’d developed for men and women with sexual problems.
Masters and Johnson married in 1971 and divorced 20 years later, when Masters left Johnson to pursue a sweetheart from his youth. Johnson never remarried. Masters died in 2001.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 10 on 07/26/2013