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Contravening Contraception
Book recalls government ban on contraceptives By Jane M. Sanders |
Julius Schmidt and Rosemarie Lewis were two American entrepreneurs who recognized and met consumer demand, despite a federal product ban that jeopardized their livelihood. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these entrepreneurs invented and sold homemade contraceptive products, which were banned under an anti-obscenity law passed by Congress in 1873. The ban left consumers of black market products unprotected, and sometimes the human costs were high.
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Their stories and many others, along with "big picture" events such as the invention of the birth control pill, will be documented in a history of the U.S. contraceptive industry to be published by Hill & Wang. The book, "Devices and Desires: Women, Men and the Commercialization of Contraception, 1873-1973" will be the second by Dr. Andrea Tone, an associate professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of History, Technology and Society.
"The government failed consumers in a way the market did not," Tone says, describing one of the book's major findings. "But in the absence of consumer protection, many forms of black market birth control — from condoms with holes to one-size-fits-all diaphragms — caused pregnancy, pain and even death."
Tone's research has revealed two other important, and surprising, facts, she says: Women were active entrepreneurs in the black market birth control trade, and men demonstrated extensive knowledge of contraception and played a larger role in birth control decisions than previously thought.
"Surprisingly little has been written about the technological and industrial developments in contraception that have been important in transforming the lives of women and men," Tone says. "This book will break new ground by showing what it was really like to produce, buy or use contraceptives in a century that saw the contraceptive industry's transformation from an illicit trade headquartered in basement workshops and pornography outlets to one of the most successful 'legitimate' businesses in American history."
With little written history available about the birth control business, Tone had to conduct research like a detective investigating a case, she says. She pored through records of patents, arrests, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the American Medical Association. She gathered oral histories from doctors and even reviewed Victorian love letters to document how ordinary people acquired and used illegal birth control.
Georgia Tech's extensive collection of patent records revealed that inventors attempted to circumvent the contraceptive ban by renaming their devices, using terms such as "womb veil" and "married women's device." Still, those opposing contraception led passionate crusades against it. For example, arrest records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, active in the late 19th century, recorded very detailed descriptions of contraceptive manufacturers and their illegal wares.
"It was remarkable to see how many people across the country were still active in the birth control trade," Tone says. "... Even though there were laws in place against it, there was a very lively bootleg business."
Tone came across many fascinating examples of entrepreneurship, including partnerships between men and women, as well as women inventors of birth control devices during the contraceptive ban.
"While many contemporaries denounced female entrepreneurship as 'unladylike,' the contraceptive business had already been branded illegitimate," Tone says. "This stigma served businesswomen well, creating an economic arena that tolerated, even cultivated, women's commercial activism. Good credit and connections, essential tools for business success traditionally denied women, were less fundamental to the business of birth control than others. . . .
"But when large corporations began to take over birth control production in the 1930s, the heyday of entrepreneurship — for women and everyone else — came to a dramatic close," Tone says. "New technologies of production, and the regulation that came with legal liberalization, made it hard for smaller players to compete."
Such was the case with Los Angeles' Rosemarie Lewis, whose diaphragm and contraceptive jelly business is documented in FTC records that Tone found. Lewis made the one-size-fits-all devices in her home and sold them door to door on an installment plan to working class people in the 1920s and '30s. By the late '30s, Lewis was one of the top 10 diaphragm and jelly makers in the country. But as birth control became legalized, large manufacturers complained to the FTC that Lewis' products were less effective than theirs. The FTC charged Lewis with false advertising, eventually putting her out of business.
There was also New York's Julius Schmidt, a late 19th century sausage casing maker by day and condom maker, using animal intestines, in his home at night.
Early 20th century advertisements for contraceptive devices were among the many materials historian Dr. Andrea Tone discovered while writing a new book on the U.S. contraceptive industry.
(300-dpi JPEG version - 689k)
Endowment for the Humanities grant at the Huntington Library Archives near Los Angeles provided access to love letters of people who had just gotten married during the Victorian era.
"One of the things the letters revealed was how central a role men played in birth control," Tone says. "Many historians have assumed that women historically have had more expertise in and control over contraception than men, that birth control was part of a separate 'women's sphere' of activity. But men in their letters often show as much, and sometimes more, awareness of fertility control than women.
"Men have been active in birth control history on a variety of fronts: as supportive lovers, inventors, entrepreneurs, sympathetic doctors, educators, legislators, activists and, of course, as birth control users themselves. Indeed, until the Pill ushered in a new era of medicalized and feminized contraception, the most popular method of birth control in the country was the condom. So, I think there is room for a more inclusive interpretation of the role of men in contraception," Tone says.
As the Victorian era passed, contraceptives gradually became legalized state by state starting in the early 1920s. But it was a process spanning five decades and even reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Tone says. The high court's decision in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 invalidated a Connecticut law banning contraceptives and determined a constitutional right to privacy for married couples. Then the court's 1972 decision in Eisenstadt v. Baird overturned a Massachusetts law banning single people from obtaining contraceptives.
A "big event" that Tone researched for her book was the invention and FDA approval of the birth control pill in 1960; it brought about a revolution in the contraceptive industry and in private decisions. "Women loved the freedom of the Pill, the convenience of uncoupling sex and procreation. You could be on it without thinking about it during intimate relations. Yet some women worried about the Pill's side effects and feared that men would replace their pills with placebos. In their search for a drug-free and cheap method of birth control, they gravitated to intrauterine devices (IUDs). The IUD was sort of like their secret weapon. Men might not even detect it, and they certainly couldn't tamper with it."
Records charting the years preceding FDA approval of the birth control pill also revealed some interesting facts. For example, the FDA approved the Pill in 1957 for treating menstrual irregularities. Apparently, that did not stop 500,000 women from claiming the ailment and getting prescriptions for the Pill. "There were no where near this many women in the population with menstrual disorders," Tone says.
She also reviewed Library of Congress records that include fan mail to Gregory Pincus, one of the Pill's inventors. Many women asked to be his "guinea pigs" during testing of the Pill, despite the risks. And the risks were considerable, Tone says. Early versions of the Pill contained a higher concentration of hormones, making the likelihood of Pill-induced nausea, headaches, weight gain and strokes greater than today.
Though the Pill was originally invented with the lower economic class in mind, it became the favorite contraceptive method of the middle class, Tone says. Meanwhile, IUDs became popular after 1965 as women of all classes sought a simpler, cheaper, drug-free method of birth control. Then, by 1973, when Tone concludes her history, problems arose with the infamous Dalkon shield IUD and others.
The book is the result of six years of research by Tone. It is expected to be published in early 2001, and Tone believes it will find an audience among healthcare policymakers, women's studies scholars, historians and segments of the general public.
"Writing this book revealed to me the timelessness of Americans' desire to control fertility," Tone says, "and how politicized matters of the heart and body have been throughout our past. . . . A lot of the birth control history that has been written has been exclusive to women's history, but the full nuances and complexities of the history of birth control are best captured by an integrative, rather than compartmentalized, approach. This is a story about technology, business, the law, politics, sexuality and medicine."
Tone also hopes more historians will research and write about the history of medical technology, which dates back to ancient times. She is hooked on medical technology history now, she says, and plans to write her next book about the tranquilizer industry during the Cold War era.
photo by Stanley Leary
For more information, you may contact Dr. Andrea Tone, School of History, Technology and Society, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0345. (Telephone: 404-894-7445) (E-mail:
andrea.tone@hts.gatech.edu)
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