| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. By Rachel P. Maines. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xx, 181 pp. $22.00, isbn 0-8018-5941-7.)

For decades, historians have bemoaned the balkanization of the field into dozens of special interest groups. More recently, some of these subfields have split even further, so that participants write only for a limited audience of insiders. Given this state of affairs, it is especially refreshing to read The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel P. Maines. This book crosses several disciplinary boundaries, appealing to a wide range of historians as well as to the general reader. 1

Maines begins her book with an entertaining preface in which she describes why she took on this investigation (in the course of her research on needlework history, she came across advertisements for vibrators in the pages of women's magazines) and how it was initially received by the academic community (depending on the audience, with amusement, discomfort, hostility, or disbelief). The first chapter lays out the theme of the book: that prevailing male-focused definitions of sexuality forced the construction of female sexual behavior outside the androcentric model as a disease paradigm requiring medical treatment, namely, the production of orgasm in affected women by physicians. . . .

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