HISTSEX ARCHIVES: JULY 1999
© Lesley Hall and list contributors
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1999 02:26:22 -0700
From: John Baeza <jbaeza@frontiernet.net>
Subject: Introduction
Hello,
My name is John Baeza and I am a Detective with the New York city Police
Department's Manhattan Special Victims Squad (aka Sex Crimes Squad). I
investigate sex crimes, child abuse, and the occasional sexual homicide
in the borough of Manhattan. My research interests include the behavior
of serial rapists and sexual deviance. I have recently been exposed to
some of the old literature on sexual deviance and I found it extremely
interesting. I found the work of Havelock Ellis and Albert Moll to be
my favorite.
I recently co-authored an article with Brent Turvey titled "Sadistic
Behavior: A Literature Review." Although it has an investigative bend,
it may still be of interest to you. If so, please find the article at
this link: http://www.corpus-delicti.com/sadistic_behavior.html
Feedback is always welcome.
I certainly hope that I fit in on this list.
Respectfully,
John J. Baeza
___________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 10:16:43 -0400
From: Cathy Moran Hajo <cathy.hajo@nyu.edu>
Subject: NEW WOMEN'S HISTORY SOURCE AVAILABLE ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB!
NEW WOMEN'S HISTORY SOURCE AVAILABLE ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB!
A World Wide Web version of primary source materials covering the work of
Margaret Sanger was released July 4, 1999 by the Model Editions Partnership
(http://adh.csd.cs.edu).
"MARGARET SANGER AND _THE WOMAN REBEL_" edited by Esther Katz, Cathy Moran
Hajo, and Peter C. Engelman (http://adh.csd.cs.edu/ms/ms-table.html),
chronicles Sanger's 1914 publication of the radical, feminist journal, _The
Woman Rebel_, and her emergence as the foremost leader of the birth control
movement. This edition documents Sanger's indictment for violation of
federal obscenity laws, her unlawful flight from prosecution, her 13 months
in exile in Europe, and her emotional return to New York in the fall of
1915 to face trial, and in so doing, traces the inception of the birth
control movement in the U.S. The editors of the Margaret Sanger Papers
have created an electronic edition that provides images of each document,
headed by an identifying target that provides links to biographical
sketches of individuals and organizations mentioned, the text of the laws
broken, and a day-by-day chronology of Sanger's activities.
The editors of the Sanger Project welcome comments on these electronic
editions and encourage their use in college and high school classrooms as
well as by researchers.
The Model Editions Partnership is a consortium of seven historical editions
which has joined forces with leaders of the Text Encoding Initiative and
the Center for Electronic Text in the Humanities. Other editions
represented on the Model Editions website are: the DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF
THE FIRST FEDERAL CONGRESS, the DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF THE RATIFICATION OF
THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS, the PAPERS OF HENRY LAURENS, the
ABRAHAM LINCOLN LEGAL PAPERS, the ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND SUSAN B.
ANTHONY PAPERS and the PAPERS OF GENERAL NATHANAEL GREENE.
The Model Editions Partnership was funded by an initial grant from the
National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and a software
grant from the Inso Corporation. The Partnership was initiated at the
University of South Carolina's Department of History, College of Liberal
Arts, and is now located in and supported by the Division of Libraries and
Information Systems. Additional funding for "Margaret Sanger and _The
Woman Rebel_" was provided to the Sanger Project by the Blanchette Hooker
Rockefeller Fund and the Samuel Rubin Foundation.
--
Cathy Moran Hajo
Assistant Editor/Assistant Director
The Margaret Sanger Papers Project
Department of History
New York University
53 Washington Square South, #501
New York, NY 10012-1098
cathy.hajo@nyu.edu
(212) 998-8666
(212) 995-4017 (fax)
Visit our web site at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Maines' Martyrdom and Vibratory Censorship
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 1999 17:39:28 +0100
Damn! I've been away for most of this, in which I'm extremely interested
since I've been asked several times to comment on Maines's work (or at
least, the media representations of same) and have only just got hold of the
book itself to read (though I've not yet done so). I concur that it sounds
to be generalising from a tiny and probably fringe phenomenon (do the words
Isaac Baker Brown raise a resonant echo???), and (as far as I can tell)
ignores the rise of what in the UK we call physiotherapy, which became an
organised profession in the 1890s as the Chartered Society of Medical
Masseuses following the great Massage Parlour Scandal (clandestine brothels
pretending to be therapeutic, plus ca change), initially told in the columns
of the British Medical Journal. This indicates that a) if doctors
recommended hands-on physical treatment they were delegating it to trained
masseuses/masseurs, who were anxious to indicate their respectability and b)
even non-executive relief type massage was regarded with not a little
dubeity. Plus, c) by the early C20th physios were using a wide variety of
electrically driven devices, going by ads in their journal.
So there may be a whole other story about medicine and touch and
electrical devices going on which is missing from Maines' book.
The 'censorship' line does sound a little dubious (was the contentious
nature of her research the whole story?) even if it does fit into Brit
perceptions of US institutions.
I'll try and post further when I've read the book, but I have GOT to
finish vol one of Trumbach's magnum opus on sex and gender in C18th London
for a review first.
Lesley
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: Kazetnik@aol.com <Kazetnik@aol.com>
To: histsex@listbot.com <histsex@listbot.com>
Date: 27 July 1999 12:45
Subject: Maines' Martyrdom
>Histsex:For historians of sexuality -
http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
>
>I am sorry for Maines that she lost her teaching position because of her
>research, but my guess is such consequences are rare for those of us
working
>in this field. I do indeed find the assertions of her work dubious (though
>not necessarily incredible since I can still be surprised by some of the
>'oddities' of belief and practice in the 19th century), but it is
interesting
>that her work is seen as frivolous. I wonder why that should be? Are
>vibrators funny per se? Or only 19th century ones?
>
>Chris White
>
>
>__________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 07:45:24 EDT
Subject: Maines' Martyrdom
I am sorry for Maines that she lost her teaching position because of her
research, but my guess is such consequences are rare for those of us working
in this field. I do indeed find the assertions of her work dubious (though
not necessarily incredible since I can still be surprised by some of the
'oddities' of belief and practice in the 19th century), but it is interesting
that her work is seen as frivolous. I wonder why that should be? Are
vibrators funny per se? Or only 19th century ones?
Chris White
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Chris Willis" <chris@chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Vibratory Censorship
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 14:42:39 +0100
Hi!
Here's an article on Maine's book, from the Guardian last year (hope I'm not
contravening copyright by sending it to the list!). It all sounds a bit
dubious to me (the description of the Chattanooga Vibrator sounds
particularly unlikely) but I presume she knows what she's talking about -
and no, the article wasn't published on 1 April!
All the best
Chris
Movers and shakers
Laurel Ives sheds light on the secret history of vibrators
Thursday January 28, 1999
Rachel Maines was flicking through some turn-of-the-century women's
magazines in search of material for her PhD thesis on needlework. Tucked
between pages of crochet patterns, she noticed a peculiar advertisement: a
picture of a woman massaging her back with a strange-looking tool and a
slogan that promised a 'thrilling and invigorating effect so that all the
penetrating pleasures of youth will throb in you again'.
Could it be that this tool was an early vibrator? Surely 1906 was far too
early for such an appliance to exist? Maines, a teacher at Clarkson
Engineering University in New York State, recalls: 'I was between
relationships at the time and decided I must have a dirty mind.'
Nevertheless, she was curious enough to investigate further. The USA's
largest museum, the Smithsonian, was unable to help but at the small,
obscure Bakken museum of medical instruments in Minneapolis, she hit the
jackpot: 11 perfectly preserved vibrators dating from the early 20th
century.
These instruments, it turned out, were used not by women but by doctors to
bring female patients to orgasm. Only they didn't call it orgasm; they
called it 'hysterical paroxysm'. 'Doctors didn't consider this had anything
to do with sex,' Maines explains. 'A sexual act was penetration - nothing
else counted.' The hysterical paroxysm was supposed to help treat hysteria,
or 'disease of the womb'.
Labouring under the belief that women became hysterical because, unlike men,
they did not release fluids during sex, physicians set about finding ways to
release these pent-up juices. At first they used their hands to administer
the 'treatment' - a practice they apparently found time-consuming and
tricky. One Victorian physician likened it to trying to rub your stomach
with one hand and pat your head with the other. But the 'treatment' was
lucrative - patients never got better and required regular visits - and the
first vibrator, created by British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville in 1883,
was invented with the sole purpose of making the doctor's job easier.
Maines was so excited by her findings that she wrote an article for the
Bakken museum newsletter and began to present papers on the vibrator at
universities. 'Women-only audiences laughed and asked questions,' she
recalls. 'But women in mixed groups said little; they were aware that it's a
major breach of etiquette to mention the relative inefficiency of
penetration as a means of producing female orgasm. Men looked terrified or
glazed over.' In June 1986, after her first article was published, Maines
encountered a more extreme reaction: she was fired by Clarkson University.
'They said my research would deter alumni from giving money. It's a rather
conservative school.'
Rachel Maines has finally completed her book, The Technology Of Orgasm. In
it, she documents more than 50 kinds of vibrator invented between 1880 and
1900. Most are rangy contraptions powered by steam, water or batteries. But
with the development of electricity, vibrators like the one made by
Lindstrom Smith of Chicago in 1910 (which came with the tempting offer of a
free vibrating chair) began to make it into the home.
Not surprisingly, doctors were not happy about home vibrators. To make sure
patients believed their machines were superior, they bought large,
impressive models, such as the Chattanooga Vibrator, which stood four feet
tall, and the steam-powered vibrator used in spas, which had an engine
attached to a vibrating arm and required a crew in another room to supply it
with coal.
After three decades of popularity, vibrators suddenly disappeared from
public view. Maines believes the reason lay in their appearance in 1920s
porn flicks: a starring role in films such as the imaginatively titled
Widow's Delight made the fiction that they were simply a medical tool
impossible to sustain.
Recognised for the sex aid it had become, the vibrator went underground
until its triumphant re-emergence in the permissive 1960s. Maines says: 'The
women's movement completed what had begun with the early home vibrators: the
job no one wanted to do was put into the hands of women themselves.'
The Technology Of Orgasm is published by Johns Hopkins University Press on
February 15.
___________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 09:22:25 -0400
From: Carol Thomas <carol.thomas@nist.gov>
>From Chris White:
>To offer some response to Hera Cook:
>
>1. While my acquaintanceship with scientific material on heterosexuality
>is patchy, what I can say is that in pornographic treatments of the
>doctor/patient relationship (male/female) or in the 'domestic' scenario
where
>the male is seeking to 'cure' 'frigidity', reluctance etc, I have never come
>across a dildo, let alone a vibrator, which, if Maines were correct, I would
>certainly expect to find, since pornography/erotica has a strong tendency to
>adopt the norms of its contemporary culture and transform the taboo and the
>norms into the erotic. If doctors were using vibrators in such a way, I
would
>have expected to find some trace of this in 'underground' material (not
least
>because the doctor/patient relationship itself *is* eroticized). It is,
instead,
>the all-powerful penis which provides the answer to these women's
>problems, health and otherwise.
I don't have my copy of Maines' book at hand so can't quote specifics. She
claims that even Freud resorted to manipulatory therapy of female genitalia
(with or without mechanical aids, I don't recall) in his practice early on,
but as he wasn't much of a hand (pun intended) at the technique, he gave it
up in favor of other forms of treatment.
>2. I have spent my entire academic career researching the history of
>sexuality, and I have never experienced any form of martyrdom for it.
In a lengthy preface to her book, Maines relates the story of her
martyrdom, which included losing her teaching position. The real problem
seemed not so much the broader field of sexual research, but her focus on
the vibrator in clinical practice. Reaction to her project ranged from
frivolous to some sort of bad joke, perhaps because the topic is, as you
yourself point out, so extremely incredible. No one wants to believe that
any of this could really have taken place. I'm still not sure I believe it
myself, despite Maines' evident scholarship.
carol.thomas@nist.gov
___________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 03:44:37 EDT
Subject: Vibratory Censorship (& Introduction)
Dear fellow sex historians
This is by way of introduction and response to Hera Cook's very interesting
questions.
My name is Chris White and I teach on degree programmes in Literature and
Gender and Women's Studies at Bolton Institute in the UK. To date my research
has focussed on writings about male and female homosexuality in Britain in
the nineteenth century, including study of straighforwardly literary texts,
legal cases and law-makers' debates, scientific, religious and psycho-sexual
discussions of same-sex desire and activity, and pornographic material. This
has produced a number of articles, chapters and more recently an annotated
anthology of this kind of material. My research has recently changed
direction slightly, and, building on the work I have done on male eroticism
of young and adolescent boys, I am beginning a new project on
nineteenth-century 'paedophilia' (this is such embryonic reseach that my
terminology is only capable of being put in quotation marks).
To offer some response to Hera Cook:
1. While my acquaintanceship with scientific material on heterosexuality is
patchy, what I can say is that in pornographic treatments of the
doctor/patient relationship (male/female) or in the 'domestic' scenario where
the male is seeking to 'cure' 'frigidity', reluctance etc, I have never come
across a dildo, let alone a vibrator, which, if Maines were correct, I would
certainly expect to find, since pornography/erotica has a strong tendency to
adopt the norms of its contemporary culture and transform the taboo and the
norms into the erotic. If doctors were using vibrators in such a way, I would
have expected to find some trace of this in 'underground' material (not least
because the doctor/patient relationship itself *is* eroticized). It is,
instead, the all-powerful penis which provides the answer to these women's
problems, health and otherwise.
2. I have spent my entire academic career researching the history of
sexuality, and I have never experienced any form of martyrdom for it. (The
price paid for being an out lesbian is another story altogether.) In fact, it
tends to work in my favour, since (a) people remember what I work on, and (b)
everyone is interested because they feel they have some expertise to
contribute!
Chris White
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 17:06:14 +1000
From: Hera Cook <hera.cook@history.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: [Fwd: vibrators and publicity]
> Re: _The Technology of Orgasm_ by Rachel Maine
>
> (This is a long and slightly rambling query - hoping if possible to
> raise some debate)
>
> Have other list members read this book? To give a very brief, and
> obviously as such inadequate summary, Maines contends that doctors in
> late 19th century Western societies used vibrators to give hysterical
> women relief i.e. orgasms. Even given that she specifies middle class
> women, I find her argument implausible for a number of reasons (use of
> evidence, unexplored assumptions etc) and feel that the approach she
> describes was probably the province of a few 'radical' practitioners
> with a limited patient base.
>
> However, I would be interested to hear what other list members think of
> the book.
>
> My interest arises in part because I have now read lengthy interviews
> with Rachel
> Maines published in major newspapers in three countries - This is a
> phenomenon in itself, and while I admire her publicist, it seems to me
> to be a further indication that researchers on heterosexual women and
> sexuality can, if they have the right angle, receive attention
> otherwise granted only to those digging up sexual dirt on the famous. I
> would argue the reader's response is one of voyeuristic pleasure - an
> enjoyment
> which stretches from Andrea Dworkin and her celebration of the all
> powerful phallus (my description, please feel free to contest it) through
> to the current book. Does anybody have comments on research into
> heterosexual women's sexuality
> which was not attention grabbing? That is to say, what produces a response
> now in this culture?
>
> On an a very different tack, specifically on Maine - she also validates
> herself by describing an incident of attempted academic
> censorship/denial of her research. To what extent is this a reality
> today for academics researching sexuality - even if only at the level of
> failed funding applications? How do those of us researching sexuality
> today feel about donning the mantle of martyr to the cause which was
> worn so well and for so long by sex reformers and sexologists from
> H.Ellis to William Masters?
>
> Hera
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 12:37:58 +1000
From: Hera Cook <hera.cook@history.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: vibrators and publicity
Re: _The Technology of Orgasm_ by Rachel Maine
(This is a long and slightly rambling query - hoping if possible to
raise some debate)
Have other list members read this book? To give a very brief, and
obviously as such inadequate summary, Maines contends that doctors in
late 19th century Western societies used vibrators to give hysterical
women relief i.e. orgasms. Even given that she specifies middle class
women, I find her argument implausible for a number of reasons (use of
evidence, unexplored assumptions etc) and feel that the approach she
describes was probably the province of a few 'radical' practitioners
with a limited patient base.
However, I would be interested to hear what other list members think of
the book.
This is in part because I have now read lengthy interviews with Rachel
Maines published in major newspapers in three countries - This is a
phenomenon in itself, and while I admire her publicist, this seems to me
to be a further indication that researchers on heterosexual women and
sexuality can, if they have the right angle, receive attention
otherwise granted only to those digging up sexual dirt on the famous. I
would argue the response is one of voyeuristic pleasure - an enjoyment
which stretches from Andrea Dworkin and her celebration of the all
powerful phallus (my description) through to the current book. Does
anybody have comments on research into heterosexual women's sexuality
which was not attention grabbing?
On an a very different tack, specifically on Maine - she also validates
herself by describing an incident of attempted academic
censorship/denial of her research. To what extent is this a reality
today for academics researching sexuality - even if only at the level of
failed funding applications? How do those of us researching sexuality
today feel about donning the mantle of martyr to the cause which was
worn so well and for so long by sex reformers and sexologists from
H.Ellis to William Masters?
Hera