| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Carol Groneman. Nymphomania: A History. New York: W. W. Norton. 2000. Pp. xxiii, 238. $24.95.

Carol Groneman's history of nymphomania addresses a topic that has long needed a full-scale analysis by a feminist historian and raises nearly all of the important questions about this ill-defined and now obsolete disease paradigm. Her book elucidates two main points. The first is that "As new sexual rules develop in the twenty-first century, anxieties persist: How much is too much? How much is not enough? Is there a healthy, normal, natural amount of sex? And who decides?" (p. xvii). The second point is that women, far more often than men, are determined by their partners and/or physicians to be outside the "normal" boundaries, either as "frigid" or as sexually insatiable, or, paradoxically, both at once. In the case of women whose desires were thought to be excessive, "nymphomania was in the eye of the beholder" (p. 70). Groneman depicts the search by physicians and psychologists since the nineteenth century for a sexual norm for women as a kind of unrewarding Goldilocks quest: this one is too hot, this one is too cold, but where is the woman who is "just right"? She also points out how rarely the male counterpart, satyriasis, was diagnosed compared to the legions of women labeled nymphomaniacs since the 1850s. . . .

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