The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction by Rachel P. Maines Page A

follows:
    Maines, Rachel P.
    The technology of orgasm : “hysteria,” the vibrator, and women’s sexual
satisfaction / Rachel P. Maines.
    p. cm. — (Johns Hopkins studies in the history of technology ;
new ser., no. 24)
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    ISBN 0-8018-5941-7 (alk. paper)
    1. Women—Sexual behavior—History. 2. Female orgasm—History.
3. Anorgasmy—History. 4. Masturbation—History. 5. Vibrators—History.
I. Title. II. Series.
    HQ29.M35   1998
    306.7′082′09—dc21                             98-20213
     
    ISBN 0-8018-6646-4 (pbk.)

PREFACE
    When I was a teenager a family friend said I was the kind of kid who would come home from school and ask permission to undertake some risky venture by saying, “But Mummy! You have to let me! Nobody’s doing it!” I’ve since decided that this is the judgment of my character I would want carved on my tombstone. The research I have set forth in this book is perhaps the most conspicuous example to date of my fascination with topics that nobody is doing.
    When I first encountered vibrator advertisements in turn-of-the-century women’s magazines in 1977, my reaction to their turgid prose was to assume that I simply had a dirty mind. I was, after all, twenty-seven years old, between marriages, a very angry feminist, and inclined to interpret everything I saw or read as some manifestation of the war between the sexes. A few years earlier, still in the throes of my first marriage, I had received Shere Hite’s original questionnaire about women’s sexuality; the prospect of responding to it was too depressing to contemplate. The same year I saw the vibrator ads, I read The Hite Report , which shed new light not only on my own experiences but on those of my women friends.
    I am often asked, when I present papers at meetings, how I managed to find this esoteric topic. My usual reply is that I didn’t—it found me. The advertisements I found fell on a prepared mind, or at the very least, on prepared hormones. Since graduating from college in 1971 (in classics, with emphasis on ancient science and technology), I had been interested in the textile arts, and I spent two years wondering naively why it was so difficult to find any serious, well-researched histories of the subject.In 1973 it dawned on me that this could only be because women did it. For me this was the “click” experience reported by so many feminists of the early seventies. All of a sudden I was fighting mad, determined to write serious needlework history come hell or high water. After all, nobody was doing it. 1
    Needlework proved to be an exciting and illuminating focus of research. It had a very rich primary literature plus a heritage of more artifacts than any one human being could live long enough to examine, but twenty years ago there were very few secondary sources and virtually no bibliographic access. Because my early interests had been in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American crochet, tatting, knitting, and embroidery, which were at that time poorly represented in the cataloged collections of large museums, there was nothing for it but to dive headfirst into the enormous unindexed sea of popular needlework publications, by the simple but laborious method of sitting down with whatever piles of them I could find and turning one page after another. In 1976 I was invited to present a paper on needlework history at a conference on women’s history organized by Louise Tilly at the University of Michigan; it was later published as “American Needlework in Transition, 1880–1930.” 2 As I doggedly turned the pages of Modern Priscilla and Woman’s Home Companion in search of trends among the needlework patterns, my attention frequently strayed to the advertisements along the sides of the pages. It is a strong-minded historian indeed who can resist the lure of advertisements in historical periodicals; I am incapable of such iron