However, it did not lead to the rise of a 'permissive society'. In the first sexual revolution (1870–1910), Victorian morality lost its universal appeal. When speaking of the sexual revolution, historians make a distinction between the first and the second sexual revolution.

According to Konstantin Dushenko, the term was in use in Soviet Russia in 1925. White, has a chapter titled 'The Sexual Revolution: Being a Rather Complete Survey of the Entire Sexual Scene'. The term appeared as early as 1929 the book Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do by James Thurber and E. The term 'sexual revolution' itself has been used since at least the late 1920s. Several other periods in Western culture have been called the 'first sexual revolution', to which the 1960s revolution would be the second (or later).