For nearly a century, from the advent of repressive Comstockery in the 1870s to the development of The Pill in the 1950s and 1960s, the history of contraception in our national history suggests several irrefutable truths. National and state governments, ignoring the realities of consumer demand for safe and effective contraception, have unsuccessfully attempted to repress not only the creation of birth control devices but have actively engaged in suppression of information about them.
Despite official opposition, a semi-covert, but vibrant underground market economy developed to satisfy the insatiable demand for methods to control sexual reproduction. Professor Andrea Tone's meticulously researched and felicitously written "Devices and Desires" is at once a survey of the technology of contraception, a political analysis of the struggle for women to obtain control over the reproductive lives and an engaging social history of the advocates, producers and consumers of contraceptive devices over the past century and a half.
Recounted through a series of analytical and chronological narratives, Professor Tone provides an interesting perspective on Anthony Comstock, whose name now symbolizes sexual prudery and repression. Tone comments that Comstock's fierce advocacy of governmental intervention and suppression of birth control contains its own class and ethnic bias. Comstock purposely ignored the fact that his most loyal supporters not only abetted, but profited from, the production of birth control devices. (Tone's exposure of Samuel Colgate's hypocrisy exemplifies this blatant double standard.)
Ironically, Comstock's purported success in nationalizing repression and supposed eradication the manufacture and dissemination of birth control products and information generated a robust, underground market-driven economy centered around contraceptive devices. With large-scale industrial giants eschewing production, a fiercely competivite, unregulated industry blossomed and produced its own Horatio Alter success stories, such as that of condom-king Julius Schmid, once arrested and later lionized for the same activity.
"Devices" also praises the extraordinary contributions of Margaret Sanger but notes the costs of her focus. Eventually losing her egalitarian radicalism, Sanger becomes responsible for the conversion of birth control from a market-generated phenomenon to a medically-controlled activity. Though she succeeds in legitimzing contraception, Sanger inadvertently works to narrow the range of women who could obtain access to the very services and products she so deperately wanted to make acceessible to all women.
Tone's history contains numerous wise and unexpected observations about the political and social impact of the battle to make birth control legal. Chapters detailing the controversial development of oral contraceptives and the re-emergence of the IUD help underscore the esential tensions of birth control in a nation where women consistently demand a safe-reliable product but their government sorely lags behaind clear public consensus.
This tension between technological ability and restricted social access to education and product results in our country's staggering rate of unwanted pregnancies. Professor Tone's spirited history suggests that the history of contraception in the United States has many chapters yet to be written.
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