Throughout history, men used images of the female body and the female mind that proved women belonged at home making babies.
In the late 19th century, the main medical and biological theories about gender could be summed up by "separate bodies, separate roles." Male doctors argued that women were frailer than men--their skulls were smaller, and their muscles more delicate. But their key argument, a new invention of this era, was the following: from puberty to menopause, the entire female body and mind was controlled by the reproductive apparatus. As they put it:
"Woman is a moral, a sexual, a germiferous, a gestative, and a parturient creature."Or:
"It is as if the Almighty, in creating the female sex, has taken the uterus and built up a woman around it."Hence, whatever happened in the central nervous system had direct implications on the health of uterus, and vice versa--whatever happened (or failed to happen) in the uterus had immediate reverberations in the central nervous system.
Medical practitioners thought of the human body as an engine, operating on a fixed amount of energy. If you applied a lot of energy to one bodily system, they believed, you would deprive others of energy. So for example, women who went to college would use too much energy on their brain and hence would become sterile or produce neurotic children.
When things went wrong...
Since the very first physicians practiced medicine in ancient Greece, women were frequently diagnosed with "hysteria"--a cluster of emotional symptoms that were thought to result from diseases of the female sexual and reproductive organs ("hysteria" comes from the Greek word hystera, meaning "womb"). Neurasthenia was a new medical diagnosis invented by George Beard in the 1870s--a variation of essentially the same thing. Understood as exhaustion of the nervous system because of a lack of nervous energy, neurasthenia was the name for vague, chronic complaints in adult women, including anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasies, and moisture inside the vagina (though hysteria/neurasthenia was usually applied to women, it was occasionally diagnosed in men--as we see in In the Next Room with the character of Leo Irving).
One famous treatment for hysteria was the so-called "rest cure," made famous by Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Under this treatment, women patients were ordered to spend months in bed, were not allowed to read, write, or exercise, they were force fed until they were fat--essentially creating an artificial pregnancy (because this was a woman's ultimate purpose and destiny anyway). The rest cure was usually pretty counter-productive--Perkins Gilman herself endured it, to no avail, and ultimately found herself cured of her post-partum depression only when she began a regimen of work on her writing and physical exercise. In In the Next Room, Mrs. Daldry makes reference to having attempted the rest cure to little success--"I do nothing but rest!" she says when Dr. Givings inquires about whether she has tried the "usual remedies" (pg. 12).
"Pelvic Massage"
Besides the rest cure, for centuries doctors had been treating women for hysteria by focusing on the uterus directly. The "pelvic massage" was intended to provide hysterical women sudden, dramatic relief through "hysterical paroxysm" (orgasm). However, this was time-consuming and hard work for the doctors.
In 1883, Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the first electromechanical vibrator. It was an immediate hit--it produced paroxysm quickly, safely, reliably, and inexpensively.
In 1902, the American company Hamilton Beach patented the first electric vibrator available for retail sale, making the vibrator the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle, and toaster, and about a decade before the vacuum cleaner and electric iron. Advertisements appeared in such magazines as "Women's Home Companion" and the the "Sears & Roebuck Catalogue." The vibrators were not seen as sexual because men believed that women were incapable of sexual desire and pleasure. Women were socialized to believe that "ladies" had no sex drive, and were merely passive receptacles for men's unbridled lust, which they had to endure to hang on to their husbands and have children: Queen Victoria herself supposedly advised her daughter on her wedding night to "lie back and think of England."
However, with the invention of motion pictures, vibrators started turning up in pornography and gained an unsavory reputation. By the 1920s, they had become socially unacceptable. Vibrator ads disappeared from the consumer media. From the late 1920s until the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, they were difficult to find.
Sources: Lecture notes from "Medicine in American Society" course (Northwestern University, Spring 2011), the Vibrator Museum, Wikipedia, "The Astonishing History of Vibrators"
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