1970s New York City. Dell Williams, a 50-something-year-old advertising professional and former Women’s Army Corp member, walked into Macy’s. She was there for something specific: a Hitachi magic wand, which she had recently learned about in a workshop on women’s pleasure. After a disastrously awkward interaction with a pimply young sales clerk, Williams decided there had to be a better way to purchase a vibrator and took the matter into her own hands (no pun intended). Beginning at her kitchen table, Williams founded Eve’s Garden first as a mail-order operation and then a brick-and-mortar sex shop, the first to cater specifically to women.
Dell wasn’t the only Nice Jewish Girl getting into the sex toy business. On the opposite coast, in 1970s California, Joani Blank met a registered nurse named Maggi Rubenstein who had co-founded the sex education organization San Francisco Sex Information. Blank was inspired by Rubenstein to enroll in the Sex Counseling Program at the University of California at San Francisco and went on to lead women’s sexuality workshops, publish a book on women’s pleasure and invent the butterfly vibrator, among other accomplishments. After members of her consciousness-raising group mentioned how hard it was to “march into an all-male adult sex shop,” Joani opened a women-centered sex shop. Her store, the now-famous Good Vibrations, opened in San Francisco in 1977.
Both stores are still around today, if in slightly different forms. Eve’s Garden remains a small operation, renamed Lady Konfidential for Williams’s protege, “Lady K” Kim. And Good Vibrations, which existed for many years as a co-op, is now a traditional company with nine locations on both coasts.
These stores, and their founders, helped usher in a new era of sex-positivity and women’s empowerment tied to the broader feminist movement that was pushing for social and political equality. They brought discussions around female orgasm and sexuality out of the shadows and into the mainstream, giving women safe spaces to ask questions, learn about their bodies and establish their sexual autonomy.
Notably, Williams and Blank weren’t the only Jewish women in the women’s movement to center sexual health and well-being in their activism. To give just a few examples: Eight out of the 12 founders of the Boston Women’s Health Collective and publishers of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” — the seminal tome on women’s sexuality — were Jewish. Another activist, journalist and author, Barbara Seaman, revolutionized reporting on women’s reproductive health, co-founded the National Women’s Health Network and wrote several books, including “Free and Female: The Sex Life of the Contemporary Woman.”
That so many Jewish women were involved in sex positive advocacy speaks to the prevalence of Jewish women in Second Wave Feminism writ large, a phenomenon noted by Judith Rosenbaum, CEO of the Jewish Women’s Archive. While curating the JWA’s online exhibit “Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution,” she explored the commonalities that brought Jewish women to the radical feminism of the 1970s. Many of the women she interviewed spoke of Judaism’s commitment to social justice as central to their own politics. As someone raised in Reform Judaism, I can attest to the emphasis placed on tikkun olam in my hometown synagogue, from Mitzvah Days and food drives to political advocacy efforts for LGBTQ and women’s rights. In fact, many of the first lessons I learned about tikkun olam came from a feminist icon of the 1970s: my rabbi at Monmouth Reform Temple, Sally Priesand, the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi in North America.
But Rosenbaum’s research also points to a negative reason Jewish women were drawn to the 1970s feminist movement: their experiences of “early moments of exclusion from Jewish practice or community on the basis of sex.” Patriarchal Jewish traditions that kept women from participating in certain rituals, receiving a Jewish education or holding leadership positions motivated many women to advocate for equality within and outside of Jewish spaces.
While interviews with sex-positive advocates like Williams and Blank about their faith are lacking, it would make sense if a similar dichotomy inspired Jewish activists focused on women’s health and sexuality. On one hand, Jewish law makes women’s pleasure a priority — according to the Talmud, husbands aren’t just required to have sex with their wives but to “sexually satisfy” them. Further, consent is considered to be absolutely vital in many Talmudic texts. This isn’t to say that the Talmudists adopted a free love ideology. Rather, traditional Jewish views of sex are primarily heteronormative, cisnormative and focused on (the often patriarchal institution of) marriage. And, to be fair, this could be a critique of many sex-positive straight women’s advocacy in the 1970s. Additionally, Jewish law explicitly forbids male masturbation because it’s a “waste of seed” that should be used for procreation. Women’s masturbation isn’t outlawed, per se, but this loophole doesn’t seem to indicate a halakhic sex positivity. Female masturbation doesn’t involve any of the aforementioned seed, which may have assuaged the Talmudic scholars’ concerns. Or, perhaps those ancient rabbis could not fathom that a woman would want to masturbate. Either way, this prohibitive view towards male solo time and erasure of women’s sexuality presents a negative counterpoint to the elements of Jewish law that upholds pleasure as essential. Just as radical Jewish feminists were propelled by the conflicting values of their Jewish faith to engage in political advocacy, perhaps sex positive activists were similarly moved by Judaism’s dual progressivism and conservatism around sexual mores.
Today, many Jews have more lenient views around masturbation and sex outside of marriage, and it’s hard to imagine this cultural shift would have happened if not for preceding Jewish feminists like Williams and Blank. Thankfully, other Jewish feminists have picked up their mantle, advocating for ever more expansive and affirming views of sexuality. This includes activists like Jaclyn Friedman, whose former “Unscrewed” podcast was a fantastic exploration of sexual liberation and whose work on “yes means yes” consent has radically reshaped our generation’s understanding of healthy sexual relationships.
Joani Blank and Dell Williams wanted American society to end the stigma around women’s pleasure and masturbation, and I’m grateful to have grown up in a world made more open by the legacy of activists like them. Or to frame it in Jewish terms: This is a beautiful example of l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, from Eve’s Garden to Lady Konfidential, from a Hitachi wand to healthy sex lives. Amen.
