1 - The Birth of the Clinic

Summary

When Andrea Tone wrote Devices and Desires (2001), she breathed new life into what had become an old story about birth control, particularly in its illegal days. “Scholars,” she wrote, “have often characterized the period between criminalization in the 1870s and Margaret Sanger's movement in the second decade of the twentieth century as birth control's bleakest chapter, a time when only a privileged few could afford the services of sympathetic doctors or of a dwindling number of merchants who would ignore the law for the right price.” Yet, as was the case when Leslie Reagan looked into the history of illegal abortion, what Tone noticed was something quite different: although “not openly endorsed,” there remained nonetheless a thriving black market of contraceptives for those interested in limiting childbearing. The first birth control rebels, we might therefore conclude, were not the better known political radicals of the early twentieth century, but rather the bootleg entrepreneurs who had since the 1870s been breaking the law all along.

To appreciate the presence of these bootleg entrepreneurs is imperative; to take them seriously is imperative as well. As Tone described, the world of bootleg birth control was far more vibrant and complex than had been previously imagined, populated with individuals who defied Comstock laws long before Sanger began her work. Furthermore, their existence helps explain the long gap between 1873—when the Comstock Act (which banned fertility control techniques by making it illegal to send through the mail information about and devices for contraception and abortion) was first put into place—and the early twentieth century when Sanger began to defy this and other anti-birth-control laws herself.