Women on Top: Nancy Friday and the Unfinished Revolution of Female Desire

In 1991, when Nancy Friday published Women on Top, she was returning to a subject that had made her famous almost two decades earlier. Women, she insisted, possessed private erotic imaginations as varied, contradictory and forceful as those of men. This proposition sounds unremarkable now. When her first book, My Secret Garden, appeared in 1973, it was sufficiently provocative to make a writer of collected testimony into a cultural celebrity.

Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Sexual Fantasies is both a sequel and a claim about social change. Friday gathered accounts from women who had written to her or participated in interviews, then arranged them around themes including control, relationships between women and sexual appetite. She believed the generation coming of age after the women's liberation movement was more willing to imagine itself as an active participant in desire. It is a bold argument, and it is also one that requires careful handling.

The writer who asked women to speak

Friday's method was strikingly direct. Rather than produce a prescriptive manual about how women ought to behave, she invited them to tell her what they imagined. Her books offered anonymity, and the responses could be candid, uncomfortable, tender, aggressive or at odds with the contributors' everyday identities. She took these accounts seriously when respectable conversation often did not.

There was a literary intelligence in this approach. By allowing personal testimony to occupy so much space, Friday made the reader encounter voices rather than merely receive a theory. She also placed herself in a difficult position. The editor who selects, arranges and interprets confessions is never invisible. What appears to be an unfiltered chorus is also a book built through editorial judgment.

Her earlier titles, including Forbidden Flowers, My Mother/My Self and Men in Love, show that her interests extended beyond one subject. She explored family relationships, guilt, the pressures of beauty and the ways men and women explain themselves to one another. These books share a belief that private experience deserves public language, although their interpretations do not always command universal agreement.

What changed between 1973 and 1991?

In My Secret Garden, Friday was concerned with the very existence of women's fantasies as a subject worthy of serious attention. By Women on Top, her question had shifted. If women's lives had changed through employment, feminism, contraception and public debate, had their fantasies changed too?

Her answer was broadly yes. She read many of the newer accounts as expressions of greater agency, assertiveness and an ability to separate fantasy from conventional expectations of feminine behaviour. Yet the book's title should not be mistaken for a simple declaration that women had achieved equality. Friday was interested precisely in the gap between outward freedom and inward conflict.

Friday's lasting intervention was to argue that the private imagination belonged within the history of women's freedom.

The most persuasive aspect of the book is its insistence that fantasy cannot be reduced to a literal plan for real life. Imagining an experience is not the same as wanting it enacted. That distinction matters when reading testimony that includes fear, domination, anger or other difficult emotions. The material demands care rather than moral panic.

A journalist, not a laboratory

Friday herself drew a clear line between her work and formal science. In the introduction reproduced by her publisher, she explained that she had deliberately retained the freedom of a writer rather than claim the authority of a doctoral researcher. She also acknowledged that the women who contacted her formed a particular population, drawn to her subject and sufficiently motivated to respond.

This is the book's principal limitation. A collection of self-selected accounts can reveal the range of human experience without establishing how common any one experience is. Friday's interpretation of generational change is suggestive, not a statistically representative measurement. At moments, she moves too readily from testimony to broad statements about feminism, men or women as a whole.

Contemporary reviewers recognised the problem. Publishers Weekly treated the book as an absorbing, socially engaged continuation of her earlier project. Kirkus Reviews was more sceptical of her generalisations and of the distance between the testimonies and the author's conclusions. The disagreement remains useful: one can credit Friday with opening a conversation while questioning the framework she placed around it.

Private life and public authority

Friday's authority did not come from presenting herself as untouched by the conflicts she described. In her published introduction to Women on Top, she recalled how publishers initially reacted with fascination to the idea of women's fantasies, then recoiled when they read actual examples. She also described sharing her own experiences in conversations with women who had struggled to recognise or articulate theirs. Her presence in the research was personal as well as editorial.

Born in 1933, Friday worked in journalism and wrote for magazines before becoming a bestselling author. Her books repeatedly returned to the tensions between independence, intimacy and social expectation. In her later years she remained associated with the controversies that had accompanied her debut, even as the wider culture became more accustomed to discussing sexuality openly. She died in Manhattan in 2017 at the age of 84.

There is a temptation to turn her biography into a neat account of liberation achieved through confession. Her writing resists that neatness. The private life of a public writer does not validate every theory she advances, nor does it discredit the questions she asks. What matters is how openly she exposed the relationship between the person collecting testimony and the people trusting her with it.

The censorship test

The controversy surrounding Women on Top did not end at the bookshop. In 1997, police in Winnipeg challenged its presence in libraries after an obscenity complaint, while officers in British Columbia also searched libraries for copies. The threatened prosecutions did not proceed. The episode illustrates how the boundary between material considered legitimate inquiry and material condemned as obscene could still be contested decades after Friday began writing.

It also exposes a paradox. The very accounts that made the book culturally significant made it vulnerable to efforts to suppress it. Defending a reader's access to the work, however, need not entail agreeing with every inference Friday drew from her contributors.

Where history places Nancy Friday

Friday belongs to the history of late twentieth-century popular feminism, journalism and sexual culture, though her relationship with organised feminist thought was often argumentative. She was neither the first person to write about women's desire nor the final authority on it. Earlier thinkers and activists had already challenged the restrictions placed upon women's bodies and lives. Her particular achievement was to bring a large collection of women's first-person accounts into mainstream publishing and insist that readers attend to them.

The book is most valuable today when approached neither as a universal scientific survey nor as a relic to be celebrated without criticism. It is a record of what certain women were willing to disclose to a writer who promised to listen, and of what that writer believed their disclosures meant. Those are related but different things.

More than three decades after Women on Top appeared, the argument over who gets to describe women's lives has not disappeared. Friday helped enlarge the conversation. History should credit her for that, while preserving the right to challenge her methods, assumptions and interpretations. A serious literary legacy can withstand both gratitude and disagreement.