Rachel Maines: Historian who wrote a book about vibrators says it was hard to get published
It took twelve years of research and writing to turn a thin and highly speculative manuscript with the working title of The Vibrator and its Predecessor Technologies into the Johns Hopkins University Press book The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. It took another seven and half years, and more than $150,000, for award-winning documentary filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori to turn it into a feature-length film, Passion and Power, that premiered at New York City's Lincoln Center on July 28 to a sellout (and highly enthusiastic) crowd. And you thought things like this only happened to the likes of Natalie Zemon Davis, whose Return of Martin Guerre was filmed in 1982.
Certainly, that's what I thought, as I spent all those years chasing obscure sources, visiting distant repositories, and double-checking footnotes for a book I thought might cause a mild stir among my fellow historians of technology, assuming I could find anybody willing to publish it. The auspices were not promising: three different versions of an article based on the research were rejected by the leading journal in my subdiscipline, and in 1989 the Technical Advisory Board of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) threatened to withdraw the charter of its publication Technology & Society, for having published my "Socially Camouflaged Technologies: the Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator." In 1996, when I finally had a complete book manuscript, the first university press to which I submitted it returned it within days, along with a letter asserting that it would be at least another ten years before the work was publishable. And even then, they wouldn't be interested. I have never held a tenure-track position in a college or university, so tenure and promotion weren't issues, but it was worrisome just the same.
Once Johns Hopkins had accepted the manuscript, I spent the next six months jumping out of my skin every time the phone rang, thinking it was my editor Bob Brugger calling to say he'd changed his mind....
Read entire article at Rachel Maines in the OAH Newsletter
Certainly, that's what I thought, as I spent all those years chasing obscure sources, visiting distant repositories, and double-checking footnotes for a book I thought might cause a mild stir among my fellow historians of technology, assuming I could find anybody willing to publish it. The auspices were not promising: three different versions of an article based on the research were rejected by the leading journal in my subdiscipline, and in 1989 the Technical Advisory Board of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) threatened to withdraw the charter of its publication Technology & Society, for having published my "Socially Camouflaged Technologies: the Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator." In 1996, when I finally had a complete book manuscript, the first university press to which I submitted it returned it within days, along with a letter asserting that it would be at least another ten years before the work was publishable. And even then, they wouldn't be interested. I have never held a tenure-track position in a college or university, so tenure and promotion weren't issues, but it was worrisome just the same.
Once Johns Hopkins had accepted the manuscript, I spent the next six months jumping out of my skin every time the phone rang, thinking it was my editor Bob Brugger calling to say he'd changed his mind....