Rachel Maines
Biographic Data
| ID | 1082254 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachel Maines |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachel |
| FAMILY NAME | Maines |
| SIGNATURE | MAINES R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University Seminar in the History and Philosophy of Science, New York, NY, USA |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7673-1377 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie
The Warner Brothers/Mattel movie Barbie is meant to be about feminism and capitalism in complicated, comical, and nuanced ways. It mostly succeeds in its dual purpose of comedy and inspiration. The doll's origin in 1959 places her and her consort, Ken, squarely in the context of the Cold War, although neither the movie nor the doll's long and successful marketing history acknowledges anything outside the sunny world of Barbie Land. The nuclear sh…
The Smart Wife
Packaged Pleasures
Journal Article Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire Get access Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor. Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire. Chicago, Illinois, University of Chicago Press, 2014. 352 pp., illus. $35.00 Rachel Maines Rachel Maines Ithaca, New York 14853 [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Hi…
Toys and Tools in Pink
Reviewed by: Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology Rachel Maines (bio) Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology. By Carol Colatrella. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+246. $46.95. Toys and Tools in Pink is based on the author’s previously published essays on obstacles to recruiting women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). C…
The Asbestos Litigation Master Narrative
“Asbestos litigation is a quintessential example of the expansion of the scope of liability by retroactive inculpation”—Lester Brickman, Lawyer Barons (Cambridge University Press, 2011, 154). Sociologist of science Sheila Jasanoff tells us that “A master narrative is a compelling and frequently repeated story about the way the world works that takes hold of our imaginations and shapes the ways in which we perceive reality, as well as our possibil…
Defending the Indefensible
Reviewed by: Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival Rachel Maines (bio) Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival. By Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+325. $25. Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale are both familiar to historians of asbestos. McCulloch, a professor of history at the Royal Melbourne Institute…
Cold War kitchen
Falling for Science
Reviewed by: Falling for Science: Objects in Mind Rachel Maines (bio) Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. Edited by Sherry Turkle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Pp. xii+318. $24.95. Sherry Turkle’s collection of essays, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, opens with an introduction in which she describes her objectives for the book. “There are many paths into science,” she tells us. “This collection explores one of them, a path in which …
American Sexual Character
Reviewed by: American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports Rachel Maines Miriam G. Reumann . American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. xi + 294 pp. Ill. $49.95 (0-520-23835-4). Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, in his 1999 biography of Alfred C. Kinsey, observes that "America is at once the most licentious cultur…
Women, Gender, and Technology (review)
Reviewed by: Women, Gender, and Technology Rachel Maines (bio) Women, Gender, and Technology. Edited by Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, and Sue V. Rosser . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. viii+204. $20. The postscript to this book (p. 193) states that it "initiates what we anticipate will be a series of books on intellectually stimulating, challenging, and ever-expanding areas of theory and research on women, gender and techno…
The Body Electric
Reviewed by: The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American Rachel Maines (bio) The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. By Carolyn Thomas de la Peña. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+328. $35. Carolyn Thomas de la Peña has filled an important lacuna in our understanding of how ideas about technology interact with images and beliefs about the body. In The Body Electric, she first trac…
The Technology of Orgasm
The author explores hysteria in Western medicine throughout the ages and examines the characterization of female sexuality as a disease requiring treatment. Medical authorities, she writes, were able to defend and justify the clinical production of orgasm in women as necessary to maintain the dominant view of sexuality, which defined sex as penetration to male orgasm - a practice that consistently fails to produce orgasm in a majority of the fema…
Cleavage
Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering (review)
Reviewed by: Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering * Rachel P. Maines (bio) Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering. By the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+364; illustrations, index. $36.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Intended as a kind of sightseeing guide for mechanical engineering historians, buffs, and practitioners, Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering lists 135 [End Page 770] sit…
Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering
Numinous Objects
Research Article| January 01 1993 Numinous Objects Rachel P. Maines, Rachel P. Maines Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar James J. Glynn James J. Glynn Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (1993) 15 (1): 9–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/3378030 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share T…
Socially camouflaged technologies
The case of the electromechanical vibrator, as a technology associated with women's sexuality, involves issues of acceptability rather than legality. The vibrator and its predecessor technologies, including the dildo, are associated with masturbation, a socially prohibited activity until well into the second half of this century. Devices for mechanically-assisted female masturbation, mainly vibrators and dildoes, were marketed in the popular pres…
Wartime Allocation of Textile and Apparel Resources
The allocation of economic resources civilian populations in war can be treated as a problem in applied history, in which the goals and objectives of policy decisions in twentieth-century emergencies are weighed against their outcomes. An example of this process is the distribution of textiles and apparel noncombatants, for which the most important policy goal is, in the words of the War Production Board, to keep the civilian population in a heal…
Evolution of the Potholder
The Muses' Stepchildren
The Technology of Orgasm
The author explores hysteria in Western medicine throughout the ages and examines the characterization of female sexuality as a disease requiring treatment. Medical authorities, she writes, were able to defend and justify the clinical production of orgasm in women as necessary to maintain the dominant view of sexuality, which defined sex as penetration to male orgasm - a practice that consistently fails to produce orgasm in a majority of the fema…
Numinous Objects
Research Article| January 01 1993 Numinous Objects Rachel P. Maines, Rachel P. Maines Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar James J. Glynn James J. Glynn Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (1993) 15 (1): 9–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/3378030 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share T…
Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie
The Warner Brothers/Mattel movie Barbie is meant to be about feminism and capitalism in complicated, comical, and nuanced ways. It mostly succeeds in its dual purpose of comedy and inspiration. The doll's origin in 1959 places her and her consort, Ken, squarely in the context of the Cold War, although neither the movie nor the doll's long and successful marketing history acknowledges anything outside the sunny world of Barbie Land. The nuclear sh…
The Muses' Stepchildren
Wartime Allocation of Textile and Apparel Resources
The allocation of economic resources civilian populations in war can be treated as a problem in applied history, in which the goals and objectives of policy decisions in twentieth-century emergencies are weighed against their outcomes. An example of this process is the distribution of textiles and apparel noncombatants, for which the most important policy goal is, in the words of the War Production Board, to keep the civilian population in a heal…
Evolution of the Potholder
Socially camouflaged technologies
The case of the electromechanical vibrator, as a technology associated with women's sexuality, involves issues of acceptability rather than legality. The vibrator and its predecessor technologies, including the dildo, are associated with masturbation, a socially prohibited activity until well into the second half of this century. Devices for mechanically-assisted female masturbation, mainly vibrators and dildoes, were marketed in the popular pres…
Numinous Objects
Research Article| January 01 1993 Numinous Objects Rachel P. Maines, Rachel P. Maines Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar James J. Glynn James J. Glynn Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (1993) 15 (1): 9–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/3378030 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share T…
Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering (review)
Reviewed by: Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering * Rachel P. Maines (bio) Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering. By the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+364; illustrations, index. $36.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Intended as a kind of sightseeing guide for mechanical engineering historians, buffs, and practitioners, Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering lists 135 [End Page 770] sit…
Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering
The Technology of Orgasm
The author explores hysteria in Western medicine throughout the ages and examines the characterization of female sexuality as a disease requiring treatment. Medical authorities, she writes, were able to defend and justify the clinical production of orgasm in women as necessary to maintain the dominant view of sexuality, which defined sex as penetration to male orgasm - a practice that consistently fails to produce orgasm in a majority of the fema…
Cleavage
The Body Electric
Reviewed by: The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American Rachel Maines (bio) The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. By Carolyn Thomas de la Peña. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+328. $35. Carolyn Thomas de la Peña has filled an important lacuna in our understanding of how ideas about technology interact with images and beliefs about the body. In The Body Electric, she first trac…
American Sexual Character
Reviewed by: American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports Rachel Maines Miriam G. Reumann . American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. xi + 294 pp. Ill. $49.95 (0-520-23835-4). Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, in his 1999 biography of Alfred C. Kinsey, observes that "America is at once the most licentious cultur…
Women, Gender, and Technology (review)
Reviewed by: Women, Gender, and Technology Rachel Maines (bio) Women, Gender, and Technology. Edited by Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, and Sue V. Rosser . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. viii+204. $20. The postscript to this book (p. 193) states that it "initiates what we anticipate will be a series of books on intellectually stimulating, challenging, and ever-expanding areas of theory and research on women, gender and techno…
Falling for Science
Reviewed by: Falling for Science: Objects in Mind Rachel Maines (bio) Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. Edited by Sherry Turkle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Pp. xii+318. $24.95. Sherry Turkle’s collection of essays, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, opens with an introduction in which she describes her objectives for the book. “There are many paths into science,” she tells us. “This collection explores one of them, a path in which …
Defending the Indefensible
Reviewed by: Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival Rachel Maines (bio) Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival. By Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+325. $25. Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale are both familiar to historians of asbestos. McCulloch, a professor of history at the Royal Melbourne Institute…
Cold War kitchen
Toys and Tools in Pink
Reviewed by: Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology Rachel Maines (bio) Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology. By Carol Colatrella. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+246. $46.95. Toys and Tools in Pink is based on the author’s previously published essays on obstacles to recruiting women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). C…
The Asbestos Litigation Master Narrative
“Asbestos litigation is a quintessential example of the expansion of the scope of liability by retroactive inculpation”—Lester Brickman, Lawyer Barons (Cambridge University Press, 2011, 154). Sociologist of science Sheila Jasanoff tells us that “A master narrative is a compelling and frequently repeated story about the way the world works that takes hold of our imaginations and shapes the ways in which we perceive reality, as well as our possibil…
Packaged Pleasures
Journal Article Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire Get access Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor. Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire. Chicago, Illinois, University of Chicago Press, 2014. 352 pp., illus. $35.00 Rachel Maines Rachel Maines Ithaca, New York 14853 [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Hi…
The Smart Wife
Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie
The Warner Brothers/Mattel movie Barbie is meant to be about feminism and capitalism in complicated, comical, and nuanced ways. It mostly succeeds in its dual purpose of comedy and inspiration. The doll's origin in 1959 places her and her consort, Ken, squarely in the context of the Cold War, although neither the movie nor the doll's long and successful marketing history acknowledges anything outside the sunny world of Barbie Land. The nuclear sh…
Art (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · History (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Art history (5 works) · Business (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Engineering (5 works)