The Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow Levinson Prize is awarded each year for a single-authored, unpublished essay in the history of technology that explicitly examines, in some detail, a technology or technological device or process within the framework of social or intellectual history. It is intended for younger scholars and new entrants into the profession.
Madeleine Ware, Yale University
For: “Kegel’s Perineometer: Reframing Vaginal Disability in the Postwar United States.”
This paper presents a compelling examination of the how Arnold Kegel’s perineometer device played a central role in popularizing pelvic floor exercises (commonly referred to as “kegels”), making Kegel’s name culturally synonymous with their conception despite a number of physicians who had developed such exercises before him. In it, the author argues that the design, development, and–quite crucially–Kegel’s savvy marketing of the perineometer as both a medical device and a consumer technology tapped into a confluence of midcentury cultural trends surrounding medical consumerism, personal fitness and self-help culture, and Cold War anxieties about the strength of the nuclear family. In doing so, the perineometer “reified a medical model of inherent feminine disability” in which “meanings of sex, marriage, and womanhood coalesced around a phallic, intravaginal exercise device that reinforced a heterosexual ideal of healthy sexuality for American stability.” Well-researched and clearly written, this paper draws on feminist history of technology and disability studies to offer a nuanced critique of medical innovation.