Publications

While researching needlework in late 19th- and early 20th-century women's magazines, Maines encountered what she would argue were highly circumspect advertisements for vibrators. The advertisements, she claimed, showed women using the electrical devices to massage their necks and backs but the accompanying text described the devices as "thrilling, invigorating" and promised that "all the penetrating pleasures of youth will throb in you again". Maines recalled in a 1999 interview, "I kept thinking to myself, this can't be what I think it is."^[8]

She then began researching and writing articles on the history of vibrators, the first one for the newsletter of the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life. According to Maines, the article caused her to lose her post as associate professor at Clarkson University in 1986 because the university was convinced that the nature of her research would drive away benefactors and alumni donors. Three years later she submitted a more detailed article, "Socially Camouflaged Technologies: The Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator", to Society and Technology, the magazine of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology. Initially, the IEEE thought the article was a joke perpetrated by the magazine's editors and that there was no such person as Rachel Maines. However, after checking all the internal citations and Maines's own background, the IEEE finally allowed the article to be published in the June 1989 edition of the magazine.^[8][9] Her book-length treatment of the subject, The Technology of Orgasm, was published in 1998 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Subtitled "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, it won the American Historical Association's Herbert Feis Award and was the inspiration for Sarah Ruhl's 2009 play In the Next Room and Tanya Wexler's 2011 film Hysteria.^[10][11] The book also formed the basis for Passion & Power, a 2007 documentary by Emiko Omori and Wendy Slick.^[12]

Controversy

Many of Maines's claims in The Technology of Orgasm have been challenged, notably by classicist Helen King and researchers at the Wellcome Collection.^[13][14] In 2012, King's article on Maines's misuse of classical material was awarded the Barbara McManus Prize of the Women's Classical Caucus.^[15]

A central claim in Maines's book—that Victorian physicians routinely used electromechanical vibrators to stimulate female patients to orgasm as a treatment for hysteria—was challenged by Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg of the Georgia Institute of Technology.^[16] Lieberman and Schatzberg failed to find references to this practice in Maines's sources.^[16] In January 2020, Lieberman wrote an op-ed in The New York Times which drew further attention to Maines' role in promoting the latter widespread myth as fact.^[17]

In an interview from 2018, Maines has brazenly stated “I never claimed to have evidence that this was really the case. What I said was that this was an interesting hypothesis, and as [Lieberman] points out—correctly, I think—people fell all over it. It was ripe to be turned into mythology somehow. I didn’t intend it that way, but boy, people sure took it, ran with it.”.^[18] While on the first page of the book it is written "In the Western medical tradition, genital massage to orgasm by a physician or a midwife was a standard treatment for hysteria,” (p.1) and "Massage to orgasm of female patients was a staple of medical practice among some (but certainly not all) Western physicians from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, and mechanizing this task significantly increased the number of patients a doctor could treat in a working day" (p.3).