In Our Control (3 page)

BOC (Before Oral Contraceptives)

Women have, of course, been controlling their fertility in one way or another since prehistory.
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They’ve done so with varying success through the years, but nothing has ever rivaled the effectiveness of the twentieth-century methods. Some early contraceptive techniques had little or no basis in anything but superstition or erroneous ancient science. Sixth-century medical writer Aetios of Amida, for example, counseled women to use cat innards—they could choose to wear the liver on their left foot or the testicles in a tube around their neck—to ward off conception.
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Medical historian Elizabeth B. Connell notes, “In the thirteenth century, Islamic women were advised to urinate in the urine of a wolf to avoid pregnancy.”
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Other methods were a little more effective. The Bible’s book of Genesis describes the withdrawal method, called coitus interruptus, in which a man pulls his penis out of the vagina prior to ejaculation. Abortion and infanticide were also common practices in many cultures at various points in history. There are prehistoric drawings in caves in France showing a man using an object to cover his penis while engaging in sex;
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whether that item constitutes an early condom is still a matter of debate, but it is certain that ancient cultures, including the Greeks and Egyptians, used some form of penile barrier.
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By the Middle Ages there is more evidence of early barrier methods, including the use of gum, alum, and animal dung to cover the genitals and the cervix.
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Italian anatomist Gabriel Fallopius (who also provided key scientific advances regarding the female reproductive system) offers one of the first written descriptions of a condom: recommended for preventing syphilis rather than preventing pregnancy, it consisted of a linen sheath that had been presoaked in an herbal remedy.
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The potential effectiveness of chemical contraceptive agents, such as herbs, plants, barks, and metals, has been hotly debated by historians in the last several decades. John M. Riddle, historian and author of
Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance
, translated written records of ancient contraceptive cocktails with the intention of discerning their chemical components and testing their efficacy. After reviewing a thousand years’ worth of such data, Riddle concluded that many ancient methods of contraception probably not only worked, but worked well. He wrote that these methods—mostly botanical, but occasionally mineral and animal—were passed on by word of mouth by mostly nonprofessional people, so they were easily suppressed and eventually lost.
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We know that by the nineteenth century, all four major varieties of historic birth control—barrier, chemical, abstinence, and abortion—were being practiced in different forms in North America and Europe. Among other famous literary users, eighteenth-century Scottish journalist James Boswell wrote of “how he enjoyed prostitutes while ‘clad in armour,’ and Casanova told of his distaste for being shrouded in ‘dead skin.’ ”
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A modern version of the condom seems to have been invented in 1709 by one of Charles II of England’s physicians, but condomlike items were manufactured by many different means and people. They were made from fabrics (such as silk), fish bladders, and of course, animal intestines.
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Historian Andrea Tone writes, “The abundance of raw materials from slaughterhouses in Europe made condoms a staple export in cities like London, where a 1783 handbill advertising the wholesale business of one Mrs. Philips boasted of thirty-five years’ experience supplying ‘apothecaries, chymists, druggists … ambassadors, foreigners, gentlemen and captains of ships going abroad.’ ”
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Even through the mid-nineteenth century, most condoms that finished their journey in an American waste bin began it in a European slaughterhouse, although some enterprising American meat producers created lucrative side trades selling prophylactics. The processes for creating skin condoms varied and resulted in marked differences in their quality: low-quality skins were pasted or stitched together, creating a greater likelihood of flaws and gaps. Fine, beaten skins were known as “goldbeaters” because of the similarity of the technique used to produce them to that used in creating gold leaf. Other eighteenth-century inventions included the contraceptive sponge and syringe.
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New products emerged quickly on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1838, a
German inventor named Friedrich Adolph Wilde created the first modern cervical cap, and in 1842, German gynecologist W. P. J. Mensinga made the first diaphragm by placing a natural rubber sheet over a hard ring.
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These European inventions sparked American inventors to follow suit. In 1846, an American manufacturer filed a patent for the first pessary (an item placed in the vagina often used to treat prolapsed uteruses but also sold as a “womb veil”). Marketed as “the wife’s protector,” this product by New Yorker John H. Beers was a wire loop covered with fabric.
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A huge technological advance for the entire world—not just the world of contraceptives—happened in 1839 when Connecticut inventor Charles Goodyear mistakenly dropped a mixture of rubber and sulfur on a hot stove. The result was a technique for processing rubber that he called “vulcanization” after the Roman god of fire. Among the countless other technologies that benefited from Goodyear’s discovery were contraceptives. Mensinga remade his diaphragm, and many would-be entrepreneurs began making rubber condoms. As Andrea Tone puts it, “The rubber revolution in contraceptives had begun.”
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While there were various ways of making rubber condoms, they were all simple enough that “anyone could do it.”
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Abortion, practiced throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, was another way that women chose to control how many children they had. While twenty-first century women think of birth control and abortion as separate things, women in previous centuries would have been less likely to see them as discrete. Abortion was legal in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century, and there is good evidence that women used this option generally up until the quickening (when fetal movement can be felt for the first time). Leslie J. Reagan writes, “In the 1840s and 1850s, abortion became commercialized and was increasingly used by married, white, native-born Protestant women of the middle and upper classes.”
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In other words, abortion was mainstream birth control with at least some cultural acceptance. Significantly, it was a long campaign on the part of the newly formed American Medical Association (AMA), begun in 1857, that ultimately led to the criminalization of the process. By the mid- to late-nineteenth century, several debates concerning fertility control had emerged. Most basically, of course, were fundamental issues regarding when and if pregnancy should be prevented—issues that we still grapple
with today. Multiple factors such as age, marital status, class, and race imbue pregnancy prevention with different meanings for different people. While African American women were forced under slavery to reproduce as often as possible, social policy in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century shifted to discourage black women from having babies. As immigrants from southern and eastern Europe began to arrive in large numbers on American shores, those of Anglo-Saxon descent began to worry that they were being outnumbered. As a result, white women were encouraged to avoid birth control and produce as many children as possible. Babies were not equally valued, and therefore the reproductive options available to their potential mothers were not the same.

In the nineteenth century childbirth was dangerous, and for that reason some communities found the prevention of births acceptable. If a woman was seen as being in frail health, she might be more likely to opt for contraception than undergo the dangers of repeated births. A close second to the question of who should have children or prevent them was the issue of who should control contraception, men or women. In marketing a womb veil in the 1860s, Dr. Edward Bliss Foote promoted the device, saying, “It places conception entirely under the control of the wife, to whom it naturally belongs: for it is for her to say at what time and under what circumstances she will become the mother and the moral, religious, and physical instructress of offspring.”
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Unfortunately, such belief in the importance of female control of contraception and childbirth was not typical.

By the 1870s, there were a large assortment of available devices, including douching syringes, diaphragms, cervical caps, and condoms. Women and men could buy these items through the mail, in drugstores, and from other sources. At this point in time, contraception was a business almost anyone could get into. This meant that a lot of devices were available from a lot of places, but also that there was a tremendous amount of danger involved, somewhat like the natural medicine world today. Because there was limited regulation, it was difficult to tell the good products from the bad. And nothing was terribly good, especially considering the rampant misinformation about female biology—most prominently a belief that women ovulated during their periods, a mistake that led to many unwanted pregnancies.

The Criminalization of Contraception

In the second half of the nineteenth century, after the Civil War had ended, America underwent vast cultural changes. Cities offered young people opportunity and freedom, and single women began pouring into America’s urban centers. Reproductive historian Rickie Solinger has chronicled the ways in which the city increasingly offered unmarried females unmatched potential for economic, vocational, and sexual independence, which made the new availability of fertility control important: “In short, the anonymity of the city gave women, married and unmarried, unprecedented need for and access to contraception and abortion … dangers of many kinds went with anonymity, but so did a new independence.”
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Women’s roles were shifting slowly but steadily, and forces with a stake in maintaining traditional power relationships began to mobilize against the social tide. In addition to shifting gender roles, there were big demographic changes in American life. Immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe were changing the ethnic composition of the United States in ways that threatened “native” populations, who were witnessing declining birth rates. Many powerful people of Anglo-Saxon descent decided that the only way to maintain the balance of power in the United States was to outbreed newcomers. Anxiety about the growing social freedom of women and the growing populations of immigrants (concerns that are resurfacing in conservative anti-immigrant rhetoric today) converged to create a cultural environment that was hostile to birth control. Solinger writes, “This crazy quilt of post–Civil War urban elements—thousands of young women separated from family authority and protection, libertarian and reform organizations espousing varieties of personal freedom, growing immigrant communities and other demographic trends … altogether stimulated a determined group of moral reformers to act in the interests of reproductive restraint. The goal was to save America.”
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These moralists saw getting rid of contraception as a way to “take back” American womanhood and protect the “racial health” of the country. As in so many points in American history, women’s bodies became a place where those in power sought to influence social policy and enforce domination of one group over others.

One moralist, Anthony Comstock, a young Civil War veteran raised
on a steady diet of strict Congregationalist Christianity, saw young girls as victims of an industrial behemoth that preyed on the weak. He wrote in 1876, “When the victims have been polluted in thought and imagination and thus prepared for the commission of lustful crime, the authors of their debasement present a variety of implements by the air of which they promise them the practice of licentiousness without its direful consequences.”
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Contraceptive entrepreneurs, in this figuration, created the problem of sexual licentiousness and then offered solutions to its physical but not its moral consequences.

In 1873 Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), an organization that would become the major vehicle through which he promoted his social agendas. The NYSSV soon had sister associations in other major cities including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. The same year he founded the NYSSV, Comstock drafted an anti-obscenity bill that he planned to take to Congress. His idea for curbing the sex industry was to prevent the mailing of items he deemed obscene between states. Womb veils and condoms, often sold by the same merchants as pornographic imagery or advertised in magazines alongside more salacious wares, were included among the forbidden items. Nearly half a century later, Margaret Sanger remembered this lesson of guilt by association and worked to draw a hard line between the sex trade and the birth control business.

When Comstock took his bill to Washington, it wasn’t smooth sailing: some lawmakers objected that doctors should reserve the right to provide contraception at their discretion. However, perhaps in part due to the social censure that awaited anyone who objected to Comstock’s bill (including unsubtle suggestions that those who opposed it had a financial stake in the trade or friends who did), the legislation passed. It was official; Congress had outlawed sending any “article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception.”
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