Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Sex and bodily effluvia 149
Part of society believed that orgasm is essential to female health, and another
part that female orgasm was somehow bestial. It is a fact that orgasm relieves
such symptoms as pelvic hyperaemia, sleeplessness, anxiety, headaches and
nervousness. Massage was often delegated to midwives, and eventually
machines (manual and other) at ancient, medieval and modern bath houses
or spas – venues that have been associated with sexual activity since antiquity.
Roman baths were noted venues for prostitution, and the spas at Bath
in England also had a scandalous reputation. Mechanical devices were
quickly favoured because they accomplished within five minutes what the
physician took an hour to achieve by manual stimulation. 12 Before vibrators
came on the market, ‘hysterical’ women were encouraged to use jets of water,
take up horseback riding, use treadle sewing machines, ride bicycles and even
travel on trains (!). Mortimer Granville invented a portable battery powered
vibrator in 1893 for the purpose of massage, though he did not approve of it
being used for masturbation. However, vibrator ads appeared in the Companion
as early as 1906 ‘for equipment strongly resembling the devices now sold
to women as masturbation aids’. 13
The first home appliance to be electrified was the sewing machine in 1889, followed
in the next ten years by the fan, the teakettle, the toaster, and the vibrator. The last
preceded the electric vacuum cleaner by some nine years, the electric iron by ten, and
the electric frying pan by more than a decade, possibly reflecting consumer priorities.
(Maines 1999: 100)
From first decade of twentieth century until the 1920s, the vibrator was
marketed as a home appliance through advertising in such periodicals as Needlecraft,
Home Needlework Journal, Modern Women, Hearst’s, McClure’s, Woman’s Home
Companion, and Modern Priscilla. The device was marketed mainly to women as a
health and relaxation aid, in ambiguous phrases such as ‘all the pleasures of youth . . .
will throb within you’. (Maines 1999: 19)
As we saw in Figure 2.2, the advertising patter has not changed. The American
Vibrator advertised in Woman’s Home Companion of April 1906, p. 42,
‘can be used by yourself in the privacy of dressing room or boudoir, and
furnishes every woman with the very essence of perpetual youth’ [sic]. The
Bebout Vibrator sold for five dollars; the ad for it in National Home Journal
of 1908 reads, ‘Gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing. Invented by a
woman who knows a woman’s needs. All nature pulsates and vibrates with
life.’ In Modern Priscilla of April 1913, an ad promised ‘a machine that
gives 30,000 thrilling, invigorating, penetrating, revitalizing vibrations per
minute’. The Sears, Roebuck Catalogue of 1918, p. 4, lists vibrators as ‘Aids
That Every Woman Appreciates’. Clearly, vibrators were being marketed
to women for private use as frequently as they desired; and doubtless the
more daring would involve their partners, too. The vibrator as a home and