Her 1976 book, ‘The Hite Report,’ touched off ‘a revolution in the bedroom’ and has sold tens of millions of copies. But harsh criticism drove her to self-exile in Europe.

Shere Hite, who startled the world in the 1970s with her groundbreaking reports on female sexuality and her conclusion that women did not need conventional sexual intercourse — or men, for that matter — to achieve sexual satisfaction, died on Wednesday at her home in London. She was 77.

Her husband, Paul Sullivan, confirmed the death to The Guardian. The newspaper quoted a friend of Ms. Hite’s as saying that she had been treated for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Her most famous work, “The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality” (1976), challenged societal and Freudian assumptions about how women achieved orgasm: It was not necessarily through intercourse, Ms. Hite wrote; women, she found, were quite capable of finding sexual pleasure on their own.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/books/shere-hite-dead.html