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Masters and Johnson met in 1957 when William Masters hired Virginia Johnson as a research assistant to undertake a comprehensive study of human sexuality. As part of their clinical research, Masters and Johnson observed paid volunteers engaging in sexual activity while hooked to wires in their lab. At Masters' request, Masters and Johnson engaged in intercourse as subjects of their own study and eventually became lovers. They often spent summer vacations together in Masters' home while his wife Libby and children were traveling. Associates believed that towards the end of his marriage to first wife Libby, Masters and Johnson worked and traveled together seven days a week. Masters undeniably spent more time in the lab with Johnson than he did with his wife and children and all but lived with Johnson in whose home he spent of time. Masters divorced his first wife to marry Johnson in 1971. They divorced in March 18, 1993 in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County. Previously, the study of human sexuality (sexology) had been a largely neglected area of study due to the restrictive social conventions of the time, with prostitution as a notable exception.
Alfred Kinsey and colleagues at Indiana University had previously published two volumes on sexual behavior in the human male and female (known as the Kinsey Reports), in 1948 and 1953, respectively, both of which had been revolutionary and controversial in their time. Kinsey's work however, had mainly investigated the frequency with which certain behaviors occurred in the population and was based on personal interviews, not on laboratory observation. In contrast, Masters and Johnson set about to study the structure, psychology, and physiology of sexual behavior, through observing and measuring masturbation and sexual intercourse in the laboratory.
Initially, participants used in their experiments were prostitutes. Masters and Johnson explained that they were a socially isolated group of people, they were knowledgeable about sex, and that they were willing to cooperate with the study. Of the 145 prostitutes that participated, only a select few were further evaluated for their genital anatomy and their physiological responses. In later studies, however, Masters and Johnson recruited 382 women and 312 men from the community. The vast majority of participants were white, they had higher education levels, and most participants were married couples.
As well as recording some of the first physiological data from the human body and sex organs during sexual excitation, they also framed their findings and conclusions in language that espoused sex as a healthy and natural activity that could be enjoyed as a source of pleasure and intimacy.
The era in which their research was conducted permitted the use of methods that had not been attempted before, and that have not been attempted since: "[M]en and women were designated as 'assigned partners' and arbitrarily paired with each other to create 'assigned couples'."
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