Rachel P. Maines, an independent scholar who is employed as a technical processor in the Nestle Library in Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, is the recipient of this year's Herbert Feis Prize in recognition of her scholarly book, "The Technology of Orgasm 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

The prize is awarded annually by the American Historical Association, the pre-eminent professional society of historians. and was presented to Maines at its annual meeting in Chicago Jan. 7. The prize is named after Herbert Feis (1893-1972), a public servant and historian of recent American foreign policy, and is intended to recognize the recent work of public historians or independent scholars.

The five-member committee of historians who awarded this year's Feis Prize wrote: "Maines' research has reached back over centuries of medical documentation, deep into archives of technology, advertising and medicine, and across disciplines. Her persistence in pursuing her topic, in spite of general disbelief and at times outrage, upholds the intellectual freedom and originality that should be the mark of the truly independent scholar."

Maines' highly original book discusses a forgotten chapter in late 19th- and early 20th-century medical history, when an assortment of women's maladies were commonly diagnosed by the male medical profession as "hysteria" or "pelvic hyperemia" - congestion of the genitalia. Maines documents how doctors of that era routinely employed an assortment of vibrators to treat the so-called ailment, regularly performing "vulvular massage" on their female patients to "relieve tension." They performed the task in their offices as a standard medical procedure and considered it a chore. Initially they inherited the job because of 19th-century religious proscriptions against self-masturbation. "Most of them did it because they felt it was their duty," said Maines. "It wasn't sexual at all."

The book was discussed in depth, and with some bemusement, by Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Natalie Angier in The New York Times, Feb. 23, 1999. Angier called it an "exhaustively researched if decidedly offbeat work."

"Vibrators were ... marketed directly to women, as home appliances," noted Angier. "In fact, the vibrator was only the fifth household device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster - perhaps, Dr. Maines suggests, 'reflecting consumer priorities.'''

Indeed, the vibrators of the era were pitched by manufacturers in such magazines as Women's Home Companion and the Sears and Roebuck Catalog as asexual and genteel aides to women's good health. In fact, Maines got the idea for the book when she stumbled on print advertisements for vibrators in an early edition of Needlework magazine and did further research on their use. Most of the early vibrators were nonphallic in form, imaginative in design (including one that played music) and recommended for external use only. Apparently vibrators remained a staple in doctors' offices and women's boudoirs until the 1920s, when their appearance in stag films cost them their respectability.

Ronald Kline, Cornell associate professor of the history of technology, called the book "a fascinating story that improves our understanding of women and the material culture of technology, specifically the gendered construction of men as medical experts and women as consumers and, indeed, objects of medical knowledge."

Maines' book also garnered the American Foundation for Gender and Genital Medicine and Science's 2001 biennial award for a single authored, outstanding book on a sexological subject. She will be formally recognized for this second award at the World Association for Sexology's World Congress in Paris this July.

Maines received her Ph.D. in applied history from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. In addition to doing her own research, she ran a firm that offered cataloging and research services to archives and museums before joining the library staff of the Hotel School in 1999.