Andrea Tones’ Devices & Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (2001) challenges outdated understandings of sexual knowledge and practice with an examination of the birth control industry under Comstock. Utilizing trade journals, business records, personal papers, medical studies, credit reports, and arrest records, Tone presents a business and social history in three parts, beginning with an examination of a black-market era of the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, she asserts that

Andrea Tones’ Devices & Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (2001) challenges outdated understandings of sexual knowledge and practice with an examination of the birth control industry under Comstock. Utilizing trade journals, business records, personal papers, medical studies, credit reports, and arrest records, Tone presents a business and social history in three parts, beginning with an examination of a black-market era of the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, she asserts that the greatest continuity in the history of birth control is the extent to which sexually active individuals turned to the marketplace to meet their contraceptive needs, irrespective of the legal status of birth control.

Victorians were familiar with several manufactured contraceptive choices, which were readily available from small shops or by mail order until the Comstock Act deemed them obscene. Tone stresses that the law’s demonization of contraceptives was a response to their commercial visibility, not to their invention or use. The sale of condoms and abortifacients in early America provide evidence of a fledgling contraceptive industry, while developments beginning in the 1830s enhanced its place in the public marketplace. Vulcanization technology invented by Charles Goodyear gave rise to the domestic manufacture of condoms, intrauterine devices, douching syringes, womb veils (the nineteenth-century term for diaphragms and cervical caps), and male caps, which Tone describes as shields that covered only the tip of the penis, offering less protection from pregnancy than condoms but greater stimulation to the wearer.

While scholars have often characterized Comstock as the beginning of birth control’s bleakest chapter, when only a privileged few could afford services of sympathetic doctors or of a dwindling number of merchants willing to ignore the law, Tone asserts that sexually active Victorians in cities across America continued to purchase a host of manufactured contraceptives. She cites an abundance of evidence – from arrest records to credit reports, trade catalogues, trial transcripts, advertisements, patents, medical literature, and private letters between lovers and friends – that points to a scenario in which legal leniency, entrepreneurial savvy, and cross-class consumer support enabled the black market in birth control to thrive. Tone makes clear that her findings do not point to a hitherto unrecognized golden age of safe or effective birth control. “They do, however, call into question assumptions of draconian enforcement of birth control restrictions and shed new light on sexual practices as they were defined by ordinary Victorians…Not openly endorsed, contraceptives were nonetheless accepted as Americans of all backgrounds created a zone of tolerance in which birth control was routinely made, sold, bought, and used” (Tone, p. 26).

Tone turns to letters shared between Albert and Violet Janin, also featured in Lystra’s work, to illustrate the limits of Comstock. The couple was married on May 14, 1874, fourteen months after the law was passed. From Albert’s boasts of “hymen breaking” Tone surmises that Violet’s first experience of intercourse occurred that night. Due to a fear of childbearing, the new bride anxiously awaited the onset of her menstrual period. As we have already learned, Albert supported Violet’s goal to avoid pregnancy, and managed the couple’s use of the rhythm method. What Tone adds to the story is that Violet did not trust the technique, and her letters to Albert, who worked away from home for much of the year, were plagued with worry. The couple eventually discussed the possibility of using condoms, a method that might be more reliable. In November, Violet asked if he could find something he had told her about and Albert apparently had no trouble securing a supply. “‘I have managed to procure some things I have once or twice spoken to you about. Can you guess what they are?” he wrote playfully…and what emerges from the Janins’ prose is not pangs of guilt for breaking the law but shared resolve to keep Violet from getting pregnant, whatever the cost” (Tone, p. 42-43).

Victorian lovers like the Janins, willing to break the law to avoid pregnancy, created a market for entrepreneurs, including Joseph Backrach, a German-born immigrant and father of seven who made condoms and male caps from his Brooklyn home. According to Tone, his 1885 inventory included more than twelve thousand such devices. She also explains that Backrach’s competition came not from large rubber manufactures who had national reputations to protect, but from smaller players, many of whom also cobbled together birth control devices in their homes to become central players in the illicit world of contraceptive manufacture. Like Backrach, many of these entrepreneurs were immigrants, sometimes women, and few possessed a formal education. “Denied the credit and social or educational credentials needed to claim professional respectability or ascend the financial ladder, they were drawn to a trade whose illegitimate character and low-capital requirements made it welcoming to ordinary people” (Tone, p. 47).

While Comstock did not stop the manufacture, sale, and use of contraceptives, it created other potential harms. Sexual knowledge deemed obscene could only be shared in private, eliminating the possibility of public discussion of efficacy. During this black-market era, contraceptives were illicit goods to be confiscated, not merchandise to be regulated and inspected. Without government safeguards to protect consumers from unscrupulous merchants and shoddy wares, America’s birth control buyers were on their own. Refusing to let their procreative destinies be held hostage by absent safeguards, women and men invented strategies to shield themselves from quackery. They shared experiences with family and friends and sought advice from experienced contraceptors. To better the odds of pregnancy prevention they used multiple contraceptives at once, while yearning for superlative devices that felt and worked better. “The precautions did not eliminate heart-break, pain, or pregnancy. But they apparently helped. National fertility rates dropped steadily after 1880, most sharply among African-Americans. In 1910, only France had a lower birthrate in the Western world” (Tone, p. 68).

