Contraceptives

If you are looking for a fascinating bedtime read with a difference, check out Andrea Tone’s book, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America and you’ll be riveted by some amazing facts on early types of contraceptives and their use.

Did you know, for instance that:

• condoms were first invented by a down-and-out sausage-casing worker who turned surplus animal intestines into a million-dollar condom enterprise?
• inventors fashioned cervical caps out of watch springs
• a mother of six kissed photographs of the inventor of the Pill

The book begins with the criminalization of the birth control business and ends with today’s contraceptives, (including Depo-Provera and Norplant). Andrea looks at the benefits of chemical prophylaxes kits for World War I soldiers, the Lysol antiseptic douche and the disastrous 1973 Dalkon Shield.

I found this interesting review for Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America

Andrea Tone provides valuable new insights into what it was like to make, sell, buy, and use contraceptives in a period when contraception developed from an illicit trade to a big business. Her account challenges the conventional view that contraceptive history is a tale of progress in which bad, over-the-counter, contraceptives were replaced by good, medically prescribed methods.”
–Carole R. McCann, author of Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945
With a few surprises tucked in here and there, the book is fun to read and takes us on a journey from an illicit trade located in basement workshops and pornography outlets to one of the most successful legitimate businesses in American history.

Author
Andrea Tone, an associate professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is the author of The Business of Benevolence and the editor of Controlling Reproduction: An American History.