Black market birth control: Contraceptive entrepreneurship and criminality in the gilded age

Journal of American History

Volumn 87, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 435-459

  Tone, Andrea ^a  

^a GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADVERTIZING; ARTICLE; COMMERCIAL PHENOMENA; CONTRACEPTION; ECONOMICS; HISTORY; JURISPRUDENCE; METHODOLOGY; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL STATUS; UNITED STATES;

ADVERTISING; COMMERCE; CONTRACEPTION; CONTRACEPTION BEHAVIOR; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; JURISPRUDENCE; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; UNITED STATES;

EID: 33748088155     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2568759     Document Type: Article

References (176)

1. Anthony Comstock to David B. Parker, June 1, 1878, box 27, Postal Inspection Service Records, Post Office Department Records, RG 28 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.); New York Times, May 10, 1878, p. 1;
2. National Police Gazette, May 21, 1878, p. 14.
3. Sarah Chase listed herself as a physician in the city directory. See 1882-83 New York City Directory (New York, 1882),
4. s.v. "Chase, Frank B." D. M. Bennett, Anthony Comstock: His Career of Cruelty and Crime (1878; New York, 1971), 1074.
5. "Report of Persons Arrested Under the Auspices of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Year 1878," container 1, Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.); Comstock to Parker, June 1, 1878, box 27, Postal Inspection Service Records; Bennett, Anthony Comstock, 1074-75;
6. New York Times, May 10, 1878, p. 1;
7. National Police Gazette, May 21, 1878, p. 4.
8. New York Times, June 26, 1888, p. 1;
9. Comstock to Parker, June 1, 1878, box 27, Postal Inspection Service Records; "Report of Persons Arrested . . . 1878"; National Police Gazette, June 26, 1888, p. 1;
10. National Police Gazette, ibid., July 20, 1878, p. 1;
11. Bennett, Anthony Comstock, 1080.
12. "Report of Persons Arrested Under the Auspices of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Year 1900," container 3, Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, 1994), 132.
13. The most comprehensive histories of modern birth control examine the evolution of the post-1873 industry only peripherally. See, for instance, an otherwise brilliant book, Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York, 1974);
14. David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, 1970);
15. James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 (New York, 1978);
16. Ellen Chesler, Women of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York, 1992);
17. Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America;
18. Constance Chen, "The Sex Side of Life": Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education (New York, 1996);
19. Carole McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945 (Ithaca, 1994);
20. and Donald T. Critchlow, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America (New York, 1999).
21. On the birth control business in relation to the development and mass marketing of oral contraceptives, see Bernard Asbell, The Pill: A Biography of the Drug that Changed the World (New York, 1995), 156-69;
22. Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970 (Baltimore, 1998), 21-27, 48, 51;
23. and Lara Marks, Sexual Chemistry: An International History of the Pill (New Haven, forthcoming).
24. Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York, 1938), 93-95;
25. Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, 288.
26. Brodie acknowledges that Sanger's remarks were exaggerared but accepts their basic premise. See also Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1980), 222;
27. Shirley Green, The Curious History of Contraception (London, 1971), 15;
28. Carol Flora Brooks, "The Early History of the Anti-Contraceptive Laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut," American Quarterly, 18 (Spring 1966), 22;
29. Kathleen Endres, "'Strictly Confidential': Birth-Control Advertising in a Nineteenth-Century City," Journalism Quarterly, 63 (Winter 1986), 748-51;
30. and C. Thomas Dienes, Law, Politics, and Birth Control (Urbana, 1972), 50-73.
31. Two notable exceptions, neither of which explores the social or economic impact of criminalization in depth, are: Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1985), 175-95;
32. and John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York, 1988).
33. Much has been written about antiobscenity measures and the judicial rulings that curbed and finally struck them down, but little about the everyday evasion and enforcement of contraceptive laws.
34. For the first interpretation of Progressive business regulations as serving the interest of big business, see Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New York, 1963). For a more recent exploration of the regulatory road to corporate capitalism,
35. see Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865-1916 (Baltimore, 1994).
36. See also Charles W. McCurdy, "The Knight Sugar Decision of 1895 and the Modernization of American Corporation Law, 1869-1903," Business History Review, 53 (Autumn 1979), 304-42.
37. On small and medium-sized businesses, see Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925 (Princeton, 1997);
38. and Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Urbana, 1997).
39. On female entrepreneurship, see Wendy Gamber, "A Gendered Enterprise: Placing Nineteenth-Century Businesswomen in History," Business History Review, 72 (Summer 1998), 188-218;
40. Kathy Peiss, "Vital Industry and Women's Ventures: Conceptualizing Gender in Twentieth-Century Business History," Business History Review, ibid., 219-41;
41. Katina L. Manko, "Now You Are in Business for Yourself: The Independent Contractors of the California Perfume Company, 1886-1938," Business and Economic History, 26 (Fall 1997), 5-26;
42. Rickie Solinger, The Abortionist: A Woman against the Law (New York, 1994);
43. and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, "Business Ladies: Midwestern Women and Enterprise, 1850-1880," Journal of Women's History, 3 (Spring 1991), 65-89.
44. The exception for the Victorian era is a survey by Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher that investigated the marital relations and sexual habits, between 1892 and 1920, of 45 women, a majority of whom were college-educated, middle-class, and white. See James Mahood and Kristine Wenburg, The Mosher Survey: Sexual Attitudes of Forty-five Victorian Women (New York, 1980).
45. Comstock Act, ch. 258, 17 Stat. 598 (1873).
46. Congressional Globe, 38 Cong., 2 sess., Feb. 8, 1865, p. 661;
47. Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 42 Cong., 2 sess., June 8, 1872, p. 790;
48. Mary Ware Dennett, Who's Obscene? (New York, 1930), 210;
49. James C. N. Paul and Murray L. Schwartz, Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mail (New York, 1961), 12, 17;
50. Dorothy Garfield Fowler, Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office (Athens, Ga., 1977), 55;
51. D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 159.
52. Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York, 1927), 46-47;
53. Bennett, Anthony Comstock;
54. Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, Anthony Comstock, Fighter (New York, 1913);
55. Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, 1997).
56. Charles Goodyear, Gum-Elastic and Its Varieties, with a Detailed Account of Its Applications and Uses and the Discovery of Vulcanization (New Haven, 1853), 170, 172-74.
57. On the visibility of the contraceptive trade, see, for example, Ezra Heywood, Uncivil Liberty: An Essay to Show the Injustice and Impolicy of Ruling Woman Without Her Consent (Princeton, 1872), 21;
58. Ely Van de Warker, "The Criminal Use of Proprietary or Advertised Nostrums," New York Medical Journal, 17 (Jan. 1873), 23;
59. Nicholas France Cooke, Satan in Society: By a Physician (Cincinnati, 1882), 24, 150. Published in 1882, Cooke's book was written in 1870.
60. See also D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 158;
61. and Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, 191-92.
62. Register of Post Office Inspectors, box 16, Postal Inspection Service Records; Bennett, Anthony Comstock, 1017.
63. Embezzling letters and mail and post office robberies accounted for 259 arrests; embezzling government funds, 11; using the mail for fraudulent purposes, 18; other offenses, 95. See P. H. Woodward, The Secret Service of the Post-Office Department (Columbus, Oh., 1886), 20.
64. U.S. Post Office Department, Annual Report of the Postmaster-General of the United States for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1873 (Washington, 1873), xxii.
65. See also Trumbull, Anthony Comstock, 188;
66. and Mary Ware Dennett, Birth Control Laws: Shall We Keep Them, Change Them, or Abolish Them (New York, 1926), 30.
67. By 1880 in every state criminal abortion laws permitted medically necessary abortions, an exemption that made determinations of wrongdoing both frequently contested and a state responsibility. Leslie J. Reagan finds, even among medical professionals, widespread use and toleration of abortion, which she refers to as an "open secret" in 1860-1940. Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Berkeley, 1997), 19-45, 62-73.
68. On the growing distinction between abortion and birth control in the late nineteenth century, see Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 193-95.
69. On the regulation of abortion in colonial and antebellum America, see James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900 (New York, 1978);
70. Cornelia Hughes Dayton, "Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village," William and Mary Quarterly, 48 (Jan. 1991), 1949;
71. and Susan E. Klepp, "Lost, Hidden, Obstructed, and Repressed: Contraceptive and Abortive Technology in the Early Delaware Valley," in Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850, ed. Judith McGaw (Chapel Hill, 1994), 68-113.
72. See also Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, 254-88.
73. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 187-93;
74. Dennett, Birth Control Laws, 268-71;
75. Brooks, "Early History of the Anti-Contraceptive Laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut";
76. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime;
77. H. S. Pomeroy, The Ethics of Marriage, Also with an Appendix Showing the Laws of Most of the States and Territories Regarding Certain Forms of Crime (New York, 1888), 185-97;
78. Dienes, Law, Politics, and Birth Control, 42-47. Of 105 persons arrested for birth control crimes from 1873 to 1898 by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) agents, all but 12 were prosecuted in federal courts. See containers 1-3, Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
79. Sixth Annual Report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (New York, 1880), 27-28;
80. Register of Post Office Inspectors, Postal Inspection Service Records; Dennett, Birth Control Laws, 32.
81. The breakdown of arrests recorded in the NYSSV arrest ledgers between 1873 and 1898 is: New York 57; Illinois 12; Massachusetts 9; Pennsylvania 7; New Jersey 6; Connecticut 3; Indiana 3; Ohio 2; New Hampshire 2; Michigan 1; Kentucky 1; Tennessee 1; Iowa 1. Containers 1-3, Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Comstock depended on postal agents to enforce obscenity laws where NYSSV agents could not be present, particularly in the West and South. On contraceptive technology, see, for example, T. J. B. Buckingham, "The Trade in Questionable Rubber Goods," India Rubber World, March 15, 1892, p. 164;
82. and Vern L. Bullough, "A Brief Note on Rubber Technology and Contraception: The Diaphragm and the Condom," Technology and Culture, 22 (Jan. 1981), 104-11.
83. The number includes those whose primary offense was making or selling birth control as well as those whose inventory included contraceptives, evidence that would justify an additional criminal charge.
84. Comstock to S. Murphy, Dec. 11, 1905, box 17, Medical Interests, Office of Messrs. Rockefeller, Rockefeller Family Collection (Rockefeller Archives, Tarrytown, N.Y.); containers 1-3, Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; Anthony Comstock, Frauds Exposed; or, How the People are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted (1880; Montclair, 1969), 5, 308, 434;
85. The Second Annual Report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (New York, 1876), 11, 14.
86. The promotional pamphlet is quoted in D. M. Bennett, An Open Letter to Samuel Colgate (New York, 1879), 8-9.
87. Edward B. Foote, The Radical Remedy in Social Science; or, Borning Better Babies through Regulating Reproduction by Controlling Conception (New York, 1886), 90;
88. Edwin C. Walker, Who Is the Enemy: Anthony Comstock or You? (New York, 1903), 16.
89. Bennett, Open Letter to Samuel Colgate, 9;
90. Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 189;
91. Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young, ed. Robert Bremner (1883; Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 148.
92. Credit report for Morris Glattstine, New York, vol. 257, p. 3342 (entries for Jan. 29, Aug. 1, 1881), R. G. Dun and Company Collection (Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass.); "Report of Persons Arrested . . . 1878"; Comstock to Parker, March 21, 1878, box 27, Postal Inspection Service Records; Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, 234. The company went unnamed in Comstock's letter to Parker, although Comstock's notes in the NYSSV 1878 arrest record indicate that he knew the name when he wrote the letter.
93. "Report of Persons Arrested Under the Auspices of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Year 1885," container 2, Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; "Report of Persons Arrested Under the Auspices of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Year 1889," ibid.; Manuscript Population Schedules, Enumeration District 622, Borough of Queens, New York City, New York, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, Schmid household; "The Accident of Birth," Fortune, 17 (Feb. 1938), 108;
94. James S. Murphy, The Condom Industry in the United States (Jefferson, 1990), 10-12.
95. See Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: Women, Men, and the Commercialization of Contraception (New York, forthcoming).
96. See, for example, "Preliminary Hearing of William C. Halleck," 1919, pp. 118, 140, Transcripts of Hearings on Fraud Cases, 1913-1945, box 11, Post Office Department Records; Goodyear Rubber Company, Physicians Friend and Nurse's Guide (Washington, 1898), 1-7, 9,
97. pamphlet, box 1, Rubber Trade Catalogues, Warshaw Collection of Business Americana (National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.); B. F. Goodrich Company, India Rubber Druggists' Sundries (n.p., c. 1895), 23-24, 33-47, 74-76, 81-83, 87,
98. box 1, India Rubber Druggists' Sundries (1895), 23-24, 33-47, 74-76, 81-83, 87, ibid.;
99. Perry, Stearns & Company, Rubber Goods of Every Description (Chicago, 1890), 28-34,
100. box 8, Rubber Goods of Every Description (1890), 28-34,ibid.;
101. Tyer Rubber Company, Illustrated Catalogue and Price List of Druggists' Sundries and Miscellaneous Rubber Goods (Andover, Mass., 1908), 10, 10a, 40, 40a, 88, 88a,
102. box 8, Illustrated Catalogue and Price List of Druggists' Sundries and Miscellaneous Rubber Goods (1908), 10, 10a, 40, 40a, 88, 88a, ibid.;
103. McKesson & Robbins, Illustrated Catalogue of Druggist's Sundries. Fancy Goods, Surgical Instruments, Sponges, Chamois etc. (New York, 1883), 112,
104. 151, 191; Sears, Roebuck & Co., 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue, ed. Fred L. Israel (New York, 1968), 32;
105. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 1902 Sears Roebuck Catalogue, ed. Cleveland Amory (New York, 1993), 455;
106. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 1908 Sears Roebuck Catalogue, ed. Joseph J. Schroeder Jr. (Chicago, 1981), 795;
107. Louis Galambos with Jane Eliot Sewell, Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharp & Dohme, and Mulford, 1895-1995 (New York, 1995), 17;
108. Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, 215;
109. Mahood and Wenburg, Mosher Survey, case 47. On the social camouflaging of other medical devices in this era,
110. see Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore, 1999).
111. National Police Gazette, Jan. 3, 1885, pp. 14-15;
112. National Police Gazette, ibid., Nov. 16, 1889, p. 14;
113. National Police Gazette, ibid., March 24, 1900, pp. 14-15.
114. "Male pouch" by Uberto Ezell, U.S. Patent, 824,634 (June 26, 1906); "Pessary," by G. J. Gladman, U.S. Patent 544,091 (Aug. 6, 1895). See also "Pessary" by T. Brauns, U.S. Patent 168, 711 (Oct. 11, 1875).
115. Containers 1-3, Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
116. "Report of Persons Arrested Under the Auspices of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Year 1873," container 1, ibid.; "Report of Persons Arrested Under the Auspices of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Year 1876," ibid.; credit report for George Brinckerhoff, vol. 370, p. 700 a/145 (entry for Oct. 6, 1883), R. G. Dun and Company Collection.
117. Buckingham, "Trade in Questionable Rubber Goods," 164.
118. Comstock, Traps for the Young, ed. Bremner, xx;
119. Anthony Comstock, "The Suppression of Vice," North American Review, 135 (Nov. 1882), 486.
120. Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 160, 164.
121. Containers 1-3, Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 167;
122. Dennett, Birth Control Laws, 48.
123. Ex parte Jackson, 96 U.S. 727, 733 (1877).
124. United States v. Adams, 59 F. 674, 675 (1894).
125. United States v. Bott, 24 F. Cas. 1204, 1205 (C.C.S.D. N.Y. 1873) (No. 14, 626); United States v. Whittier, 28 F. Cas. 592 (1878 C.C.E.D. Missouri) (No. 16, 688).
126. Ch. 78, 1879 Conn. Pub. Acts 128. On the singularity of the Connecticut law, see Brooks, "Early History of Anti-Contraceptive Laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut"; and Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 177, 187.
127. The label "Comstock," though deliberate, was not Heywood's invention; New York vendors had previously advertised Comstock syringes to signal the device's contraceptive uses. Ezra Heywood, Free Speech: Report of Ezra H. Heywood's Defense (Princeton, Mass., c. 1883), 6, 14-18;
128. Martin Henry Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana, 1989), 144-45.
129. Heywood, Free Speech, 17-18;
130. Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 144-45.
131. On Americans' preoccupation with hygiene and cleanliness in the 1880s, see Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 1-67.
132. Heywood, Free Speech, 43;
133. Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 144;
134. Foote, Radical Remedy in Social Science, 98.
135. "Report of Persons Arrested . . . 1873"; Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 168;
136. E. H. Heywood, Cupid's Yokes; or, The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life (Princeton, Mass., 1877);
137. Rutherford B. Hayes Diary, Jan. 10, 1879, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, ed. Charles Richard Williams (Columbus, Oh., 1924), 518;
138. Index to the Congressional Record, 43 Cong., 1 sess., x.
139. In cases resulting from Comstock-initiated arrests, conviction rates were lowest for those charged with violating birth control and abortion restrictions. See Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 160, 164-66.
140. Credit reports for George Brinckerhoff, vol. 202, p. 577 (entries for Sept. 25, 1867, Aug. 15, 1871), vol. 370, p. 700 a/64 (entries for May 27, Aug. 30, 1875, Oct. 10, 1881), p. 700 a/145 (entry for Oct. 6, 1883), R. G. Dun and Company Collection; "Indictment of George Brinckerhoff," Oct. 7, 1873, box 12, Criminal Case Files of the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York (National Archives, Regional Office, New York, N.Y.); "Report of Persons Arrested . . . 1873."
141. "Report of Persons Arrested . . . 1878"; credit report for Sarah B. Chase, vol. 389, p. 2293 (entries for Oct. 20, 1879, March 8, 1889, Feb. 12, 1890), R. G. Dun and Company Collection. On female entrepreneurship, see Peiss, "Vital Industry and Women's Ventures";
142. Gamber, Female Economy; Murphy, "Business Ladies."
143. U.S. Patent Office, Official Gazette, March 31, 1931, p. 75; ibid., May 26, 1931, p. 883; "Accident of Birth," 108; "Report of Persons Arrested Under the Auspices of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Year 1890," container 2, Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; Murphy, Condom Industry in the United States, 10-12.
144. "Report of Persons Arrested . . . 1873"; "Report of Persons Arrested . . . 1878"; "Report of Persons Arrested Under the Auspices of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Year 1874," container 1, Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
145. "The Fashionable Crime," Michigan Medical News, 3 (1880), 341. Only in the mid-1960s did a majority of family practitioners and internists endorse contraception openly as a legitimate field of medical practice. Physicians' opposition and ambivalence amplified the importance of over-the-counter methods.
146. See, for example, S. S. Spivack, "The Doctor's Role in Family Planning," Journal of the American Medical Association, April 13, 1964, p. 152;
147. N. H. Wright, G. Johnson, and D. Mees, "Physicians' Attitudes in Georgia toward Family Planning Services," in Advances in Planned Parenthood, ed. American Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians (3 vols., New York, 1968), III, 37;
148. Morton A. Silver, "Birth Control and the Private Physician," Family Planning Perspectives, 4 (Spring 1972), 43;
149. Pomeroy, Ethics of Marriage, 56, 59-60, 185-97.
150. Margaret Sanger, "The Prevention of Conception," Woman Rebel, 1 (March 1914), 8.
151. Between 1880 and 1940 the average fertility rate of white women dropped from 4.40 children to 2.10, of black women, from 7.5 to 3. See Wilson H. Grabill, Clyde V. Kiser, and Pascal K. Whelpton, The Fertility of American Women (New York, 1958);
152. Stanley P. Engerman, "Changes in Black Fertility, 1880-1940," in Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis (Princeton, 1978);
153. Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, 48;
154. Jessie Rodrigue, "The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement," in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia, 1989), 138-39;
155. and Mary P. Ryan, "Reproduction in America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 10 (Autumn 1979), 330.
156. On prices, see, for example, National Police Gazette, Nov. 16, 1889, p. 14;
157. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue, ed. Israel, 32;
158. and Mahood and Wenburg, Mosher Survey, case 1. For working-class attitudes toward contraceptives,
159. see, for example, the Birth Control Review, the American Birth Control League's monthly organ, and the underused Benjamin B. Lindsey Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress). In the survey of birth control, of 1,208 patients, 800 stated that they had used contraceptives. Of these, the douche was used by 60%, the condom by 42%, the sponge by 4%, the intrauterine device (IUD) by 2%, the cervical cap by 10%, the tablet by 2%, the powder by 5%, the suppository by 12%, and the "douche plus chemical" by 50%. Among nonmarket methods used by the 800, "nursing baby" was favored by 30%, male withdrawal by 40%, "holding back" by 30%, and complete abstinence by 4%.
160. See Dorothy Bocker, Birth Control Methods (New York, 1924), 4-7.
161. As Linda Gordon has argued, class differentials in contraceptive practice in the nineteenth century "were not as great as they are today, because the best available methods were not so good as they are today." Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, 70.
162. Hearings of Mrs. A. S. Hon, Sept. 21, 1917, box 63, Transcripts of Hearings on Fraud Cases, 1913-45, Post Office Department Records.
163. See, for example, Omaha Afro-American Sentinel, June 6, 1896, p. 3;
164. and Atlanta Independent, June 4, 1904, p. 6. On the contraceptive agency of blacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
165. see Rodrigue, "Black Community and the Bitth Control Movement," 138-54;
166. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York, 1997), 82-86;
167. and George Schuyler, "Quantity or Quality," Birth Control Review, 16 (June 1932), 165-66.
168. Albert Janin to Violet Blair Janin, July 3, 1874, Janin Family Collection (Huntington Library and Archives, San Marino, Calif.); Violet Blair Janin to Albert Janin, Aug. 22, 1874, ibid. On medical views of, and women's firsthand experiences with, the safe period, see Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 1996), 84-85;
169. Eric Matsner and Frederick Holden, The Technique of Contraception (Baltimore, 1938), 33;
170. John Rock and Marshall K. Bartlett, "Biopsy Studies of Human Endometrium," Journal of the American Medical Association, June 12, 1937, pp. 2022-28;
171. Irving F. Stein and Melvin R. Cohen, "An Evaluation of the Safe Period," Journal of the American Medical Association, ibid., Jan. 22, 1938, pp. 257-61;
172. Kennedy, Birth Control in America, 210;
173. Abe Laufe, ed., An Army Doctor's Wife on the Frontier: Letters from Alaska and the Far West, 1874-1878 (Pittsburgh, 1962), 165.
174. Violet Blair Janin to Albert Janin, Nov. 23, 26, 1874, Janin Family Collection; Albert Janin to Violet Blair Janin, Nov. 24, 1874, ibid.
175. Elizabeth Hampsten, ed., Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880-1910 (Bloomington, 1982), 104;
176. Degler, At Odds, 224-25.