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

self-discipline. Besides, I had an excuse: I was also looking for evidence that support from yarn and thread advertising was responsible for the large number of needlework periodicals published in the United States between 1880 and 1930.
    When I saw vibrator advertisements as early as 1906 for equipment strongly resembling the devices now sold to women as masturbation aids, my first thought, as I said, was that this could not possibly be the purpose of the appliances sold in the pages of the Companion . The second thought was that 1906 was very early for any kind of home electrical appliance. Telling myself I’d never follow up on the topic, I made a few notes on the titles, issues, dates, and page numbers of needlework publications carrying vibrator advertisements. I showed a few of the ads to my feminist friends, who were, of course, delighted.
    In the meantime my trip to Michigan to deliver my very first scholarly paper had borne unexpected fruit. A textile historian in the audience, Daryl Hafter of Eastern Michigan University, introduced herself and urged me to join the Society for the History of Technology and its subgroup, Women in Technological History (WITH). After one SHOT meeting I was convinced that it was time for graduate study in the history of technology. While I was in graduate school from 1979 to 1983, I continued to make notes on “sightings” of vibrator references while grinding away diligently at my dissertation on textile history. By this time it was clear to me that publishing my suspicions about the vibrator would torpedo my career; surely no one would ever again take me seriously as a scholar if I continued this line of research. On the other hand, nobody was doing it.
    After I graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University, I spent three years as an assistant professor at Clarkson University in northern New York. As a part-timer, my teaching duties were light and I had plenty of time for research. While churning out articles on textile history, I began a little file on the vibrator and started looking for museum collections with relevant artifacts. According to curators Bernard Finn (electricity), Deborah Jean Warner (scientific instruments), and Audrey Davis (medicine) at the Smithsonian Institution, the nation’s largest museum had no vibrators. Given that there were at least ten manufacturers of the devices in the United States in 1920, this was in itself somewhat odd. Chasing my topic through the various directories of museums and special collections, I wrote letters, including one to the Kinsey Institute, to which they replied with courtesy, promptness, and a very helpful bibliography, and one to an institution I had never heard of, the Bakken Library and Museum of Electricity in Life, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
    In writing to the Bakken Library I had carefully explained my research interests, describing the type of devices and documents I was seeking, and why. Throwing caution to the winds, in my concluding paragraph I commented that this was the first research I had ever done that appealed to both scholarly and prurient interest. Two weeks later I had a reply from the director that started, “Your letter appealed to our prurient interest …” Thus began a very fruitful research enterprise. The Bakken, founded by Earl Bakken of Medtronic, consists of a well-funded and scrupulously curated collection of historical medical instruments usingelectricity and an imposing library and archive of material relating to this topic. In the artifacts collection, the Bakken had eleven vibrators, listed in their catalog as “musculo-skeletal relaxation devices.” A photograph of one of them is included in this book as figure 6 . The library contained an overwhelming wealth of illustrations, texts, advertisements, and medical literature about my subject. I became a Bakken fellow for a week and spent five days wallowing in intellectual luxury. At the end of the week I made my first presentation on the