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Dodai of Jezebel says

Something Once Regarded As Exotic Has Become Commonplace

“According to the first academic, peer-reviewed studies of vibrator use, it is nearly as common an appliance in American households as the drip coffee maker or toaster oven.”

She said it here.

By coincidence at almost the exact moment she posted her piece I was reviewing a photo I’d taken in the Electricity Hall at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History during our recent family vacation in Washington, D.C. The photo was of a bunch of early American home appliances. Among them were now-100-year-old fans, toasters, waffle irons, and mixers from the turn of the 20th Century. But, oddly, no 100-year-old vibrators.

Which might not sound like much of an omission.

Except that, as Rachel Maines meticulously detailed in The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology), electric-motor driven vibrators were among the first mass-produced appliances sold in American homes.

The electrification of the home proceeded rapidly after the introduction of electric lights in 1878, and predictably, women were significant consumers of electric appliances. The first home appliance to be electrified was the sewing machine, in 1889, followed in the next ten years by the fan, the teakettle, the toaster, and the vibrator. The last 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.

...

A one-liner in the June 1908 Review of Reviews ... cautions readers against “imprudence” and “excess in action” when using vibrators…

...

Women were advised [in advertising] that the “American [brand] Vibrator … can be used by yourself in the privacy of dressing room or boudoir, and furnishes every woman with the very essence of perpetual youth.”

Source: Pgs.100-103

Oh yeah, and

During the first two decades of [the 20th Century], the vibrator began to be marketed as a home appliance through advertising in such periodicals as … Modern Woman, Hearst’s McClure’s, Woman’s Home Companion, and Modern Pricilla. The device was marketed mainly to women as a health and relaxation aid, in ambiguous phrases such as “all the pleasures of yought… will throb within you.” When marketed to men, vibrators were recommeded as gifts for women that would benefit the male givers by restoring bright eyes and pink cheeks to their female consorts. ... An especially versatile vibrator line was illustrated in the Sears, Roebuck and Company Electrical Goods catalog for 1918. [An] advertisement headed “Aids That Every Woman Appreciates” shows a vibrator attachment for a home motor that also drove attachments for churning, mixing, beating, grinding, buffing, and operating a fan.”

Source: Pgs 19-20

In other words, contrary to Dodai’s sources as appliances go the electric toaster predated the vibrator but not the coffee maker.

The slip-up seems natural because just a few years later Freud came along and the 2500 year old practice of treating “hysteria” massaging the vulva to the point of “hysterical paroxysm” was replaced by… talk therapy to treat “frigidity” and “nymphomania,” leaving women between roughly 1925 and 1975 largely in the lurch.