The advent of at-home electricity made the personal vibrator a reality as upper- and middle-class women had been going to their doctors to get off for centuries. Finally, the Industrial Revolution gave women the power to come in the privacy of their own homes. "The first home appliance to be electrified was the sewing machine in 1889," writes Rachel Maines in her groundbreaking work, The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Satisfaction . According to Maines, the electric vibrator was the fifth home electronic ever invented. It "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."

We have a certain image of Victorian womanhood: corsets, fainting couches, a devotion to needlework. It's true that ladies of the late 1800s were experts in embroidery. But in the back pages of magazines like Home Needlework Journal, Needlecraft, and Modern Priscilla were ads for a Victorian lady's second favorite hobby: furtive masturbation.

So why is our conception of pre-sexual revolution women so vacuum-heavy and vibrator-light? Because to those wacky Victorians, stimulating the clitoris wasn't masturbating—it wasn't even sexual. Clitoral stimulation was the palliative cure for a disease. British physician Havelock Ellis' 1913 work " The Sexual Impulse in Women " estimated that nearly 75 percent of women suffered from "hysteria," a disease whose symptoms ranged from headaches to epileptic fits to coarse language. Nearly any behavior a woman demonstrated could be construed as hysteria. The number one cure—since the disease's invention in ancient Greece—was pelvic massage.

Women in the Victorian era weren't supposed to be able to feel sexual desire, so hysteria became a disease completely removed from sex. They even renamed the orgasm: If a woman became flushed and happy from her pelvic massage, she was said to have underwent a "hysterical paroxysm." According to Maines, doctors surrounded themselves in "the comforting belief that only penetration was sexually stimulating to women. Thus the speculum and the tampon were originally more controversial in medical circles than was the vibrator." If a woman desired her clitoris to be stimulated, she was clearly sick with "hysteria," or so the theory went. And the only cure was to stimulate that clitoris until she didn't want it to be stimulated anymore. Of course, this cure only worked for so long, and hysterics were lucrative repeat customers.

Ancient Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia called the uterus "an animal within an animal." He theorized that the womb, if left to its own devices, was prone to going walkabout and strangling the woman from the inside: It needed to be lured back into place with sweet-smelling oils. These oils happened to be applied on and around the clit in a vigorous manner, which likely induced a highly restorative effect for the woman.

Read more: The Racist and Sexist History of Keeping Birth Control Side Effects Secret