By SARAH BOXER

THE TECHNOLOGY OF ORGASM

''Hysteria,'' the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction.

By Rachel P. Maines.

Illustrated. 181 pp. Baltimore:

The Johns Hopkins University Press. $22.



he book begins innocently enough. The author, Rachel P. Maines, a historian of needlework, is riffling through old copies of Modern Priscilla, Needlecraft and Woman's Home Companion when suddenly she spies them: advertisements for vibrators in the year 1906.

Imagine that. The electric vibrator was invented right after the electric sewing machine, fan, teakettle and toaster, and before the electric vacuum cleaner, the electric iron and the electric frypan. Who knew that everyone cared so deeply about women's pleasure? Deeply enough to put it before a clean house and crisp shirts and just after evenly toasted toast.

In 1918 Sears, Roebuck & Company offered a vibrator attachment for a home motor that would also drive a churn, a mixer and a sewing machine. Two models of portable vibrators were described as ''Such Delightful Companions'' in 1922. Still another advertisement promised, ''All the pleasures of youth . . . will throb within you.''

Alas, the invention of the vibrator had nothing to do with love in the afternoon or sexual liberation. It was originally a labor-saving device to help doctors give their female patients a ''hysterical paroxysm'' -- that is, an orgasm.

What in the world were doctors doing vibrating their female patients to orgasm? The simple answer is that their fingers got tired. The complicated answer is delivered in Maines's short, stimulating, repetitive and occasionally frustrating book, ''The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator, and Women' s Sexual Satisfaction.''

The vibrator, Maines argues, is the last in a long line of devices and techniques that were used to combat hysteria. Beginning with Hippocrates and running through Galen, Avicenna, Paracelsus, Pare, Burton and Harvey, all the way up to the mid-20th century, doctors fought valiantly against this terrible disease. The trouble was that the disease they were fighting, Maines explains, was ordinary female sexual desire. The classic symptoms of hysteria -- ''anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema and vaginal lubrication'' -- are the symptoms of chronic arousal.

If this was hysteria, the recommended therapies made perfect sense. In the 16th century, married hysterics were advised to ''bee strongly encountered by their husbands.'' For single women, widows, nuns and unhappily married women, ''the cure was effected by vigorous horseback exercise, by movement of the pelvis in a swing, rocking chair or carriage.'' But the most common therapy, summed up in 1653, was having a doctor or midwife ''massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk root, crocus'' or something similar. ''And in this way the afflicted woman can be aroused to the paroxysm.'' The best cures were supposed to be those in which the patient felt both pleasure and pain.

The basic treatment remained unchanged for a couple of thousand years. And in all that time, Maines writes, ''only a handful of the medical authorities who advocated female genital massage as a treatment for hysteria'' ever ''acknowledged that the crisis so produced was an orgasm.''

Why not? If doctors had admitted they were sex slaves, they would have had to give up what Maines calls the ''androcentric paradigm of sexuality,'' the idea that sex is a two-step process -- penetration and male orgasm -- and that this is enough to bring most women to orgasm too. Although most women (approximately 70 percent, according to Shere Hite and others) do not reach orgasm this way and need some sort of direct clitoral stimulation to get there, the androcentric model has persisted, Maines suggests, because it is convenient for men. How much easier to blame women for their own frustration, to call them frigid or hysterical and send them to doctors, than to trouble men with the drudgery of female arousal while they are enjoying themselves.

The diagnosis of hysteria had an added benefit. Hysterics, as one doctor pointed out, ''were an economic godsend to the profession of medicine.'' They formed ''a circle of 'everlasting patients.' '' But there was a drawback too. Physicians apparently did not like performing genital massage. Their fingers got tired and they often had difficulty sustaining ''the treatment long enough to produce results.''

To help with this exhausting task, doctors had the assistance of massaging midwives, wind-up vibrators or ''percuteurs,'' jolting chairs, tissue oscillators, hydrotherapy, muscle beaters, ascending douches, vaginal electrodes and pneumatic equipment. That is where the electromechanical vibrator comes in.

Designed in the late 1870's (there is some dispute about the actual inventor), the vibrator was the last in a line of labor-saving devices. But it survived the disease it was supposed to cure. In 1952, when the American Psychiatric Association finally struck hysteria from its list of mental illnesses, the vibrator did not die.

Maines supports her thesis with thorough, original and surprising if sometimes ill-organized research. There is, however, one serious flaw in her argument. That is the ''androcentric model.'' Contrary to this model, doctors often pointed to male inadequacy and female sexual dissatisfaction as the causes of women's malaise (as Maines points out). And plenty of people paid attention to female orgasm. In Tudor and Stuart England, for example, many physicians saw ''the clitoris as the principle locus of sexual pleasure'' and believed female orgasm was an ''incentive for women to risk their lives in pregnancy.'' So it seems likely that more than ''a handful of medical authorities'' knew they were performing sexual favors for their patients.

Maines, who says she was ''a very angry feminist'' when she started this book, sees phallocentrism everywhere. And in that she is right. But does that mean every phallic object and action is suspect? She derides the 13th-century doctors who recommended that widows and nuns use dildoes. And she condemns physicians who ''were apparently comforted by the unsupported assumption that most women'' masturbate ''by some means approximating coitus.'' In battling phallocentrism, she refuses to give an inch to the penis.