The result was a cultural earthquake. Nancy Friday (1933–2017) was inspired by her own sense of isolation. Growing up in the 1940s and 50s, she absorbed the prevailing message that "nice girls" didn’t have lustful thoughts. Even during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, she noticed that while behavior was changing, the inner lives of women remained largely unspoken.
So Friday placed an ad in New York magazines and newspapers, asking women to write to her anonymously about their sexual fantasies. The response was overwhelming. Hundreds of letters poured in—from housewives, students, nuns, therapists, and factory workers. The women ranged in age from 19 to 65. What they shared was a secret world that had never been mapped. My Secret Garden is not a linear narrative but a mosaic. Friday organized the fantasies into loose themes: dominance and submission, group sex, voyeurism, homosexuality, sadomasochism, and even bestiality. She included fantasies about strangers, celebrities, and tender encounters with familiar partners. My Secret Garden By Nancy Friday
Second-wave feminists were divided. Some praised Friday for demystifying female desire and rejecting the male-dominated narrative of what women should want. Others accused her of handing ammunition to the patriarchy—proof, they worried, that women secretly craved submission, rape fantasies, and male dominance. The result was a cultural earthquake
Additionally, Friday’s framing occasionally echoes the very gender binaries she sought to dismantle. She sometimes reinforces the idea of "male" versus "female" sexuality as inherently different, rather than seeing variation across individuals. Even during the sexual revolution of the 1960s,
At a time when the women’s liberation movement was fighting for legal and economic equality, Friday took on a quieter, more intimate battleground: the female imagination. My Secret Garden wasn’t a clinical study or a political manifesto. It was a collection of anonymous letters—raw, funny, shocking, and tender—in which women confessed their deepest sexual fantasies.