The business of birth control

Contraception and commerce in Britain before the sexual revolution

Claire L. Jones

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526136305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The business of birth control is the first book-length study to examine contraceptives as commodities in Britain before the pill. Drawing on new archives and neglected promotional and commercial material, the book demonstrates how hundreds of companies transformed condoms and rubber and chemical pessaries into consumer goods that became widely available via discreet mail order catalogues, newspapers, birth control clinics, chemists' shops and vending machines in an era when older and more reserved ways of thinking about sex jostled uncomfortably with modern and more open attitudes. The book outlines the impact of contraceptive commodification on consumers, but also demonstrates how closely the contraceptive industry was intertwined with the medical profession and the birth control movement, who sought authority in birth control knowledge at a time when sexual knowledge and who had access to it was contested.

1

The dynamics of production: contraceptive manufacturing

Alison Neilans’s refusal to endorse the Contraceptives (Regulation) Bill led to an exodus of the more religious and social purist members from the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene in 1937. In their letter of resignation quoted in The Times, Dr Katharine Bushell, Miss Forsaith and Florence Booth, wife of Bramwell Booth (son of the founders of the Salvation Army), claimed that British contraceptive manufacturers created a ‘powerful vested interest’ and were ‘enriching themselves by encouraging lust’ in men, women, boys and girls.¹ And yet, Dawson’s detailed enquiries into the trade a few years earlier revealed little to suggest that rubber contraceptive manufacturing was morally corrupt or corrupting. In fact, far from demonstrating a ‘powerful vested interest’, his research, the most thorough in existence at the time, stated that contraceptive manufacturing was ‘as respectably run as any other trade. The factories are well constructed; the workers belong to a high class, are well treated and well-behaved’. Thus, Dawson argued, there was ‘no justification for referring to the trade as “vicious”’.²

The respectability of manufacturing, both in terms of the items produced and disseminated to consumers and in terms of the workers who produced them, formed a key part of the debates over contraceptive commercialisation in the interwar years, and yet historical work to date has overlooked its significance. Instead, historians have followed Norman Himes and his 1936 publication Medical History of Contraception to focus on the impact of technological development on manufacturing, arguing that mechanised latex manufacturing in particular transformed condom production and stimulated demand by allowing consumers to purchase a more reliable, thinner and disposable product at a more affordable price than pre-existing methods of moulded sheet rubber production. Himes, an interwar social and medical scientist and protagonist of birth control, claimed that latex contraceptive manufacture was nothing short of revolutionary, and thereafter historians endorsed latex production as the most significant technological achievement after the nineteenth-century vulcanisation of rubber.³

Certainly, the trade’s rapid growth in the 1930s was aided by the introduction of latex manufacturing. By Dawson’s 1934 estimates, LRC of Chingford, as the first British firm to adopt latex manufacturing in 1932, was producing over 8.5 million latex condoms per year, while E. Lambert and Son of Dalston, LRC’s closest rival that relied on sheet rubber production, produced 3.7 million reusable sheaths. By 1939 LRC claimed to dominate half of Britain’s condom market.⁴ But the impact of latex manufacturing on the trade in the 1930s was far more complex than has hitherto been outlined. Indeed, to focus only on technological change, success, novelty, innovation and radical breaks with the past neglects the wider production dynamics of the trade in this period, its implications for demand and on the workforce, and its effect on the ‘moral panic’ surrounding contraceptive commercialisation.

It is more accurate to see Himes’s attempt to break with the traditional past as part of his own modernist vision, rather than as a reflection of the 1930s trade itself, and to view subsequent emphasis on revolution as part of longer chronological narratives that seek to explain a later technological triumph. Latex manufacturing was certainly not quick to replace older, more traditional manufacturing methods, and as suggested by Dawson’s investigations into the trade, new, modern latex manufacturing sat alongside older, smaller-scale methods for producing contraceptive goods made from moulded sheet rubber, including caps, enemas and reusable sheaths. It was only in the 1950s that fully mechanised production methods allowed LRC to dominate the contraceptive trade with latex condoms and diaphragms, and permitted the arrival of the modern condom.⁵

Moreover, home production in the 1930s formed a negligible part of the wider economy and of the contraceptive trade. Britain’s contraceptive trade was largely sustained by five times as many imports of cheap contraceptive goods from France, Germany and the United States.⁶ German production, for example, reached 100 million units in the 1920s, half of which was exported.⁷ Perhaps most significantly, however, neither the former members of the Association of Moral and Social Hygiene, who opposed contraception in its entirety, nor Dawson, as one of the most informed interwar commentators on birth control, made any distinction between old and new methods of manufacturing; this suggests that new production methods meant little to contemporary debates. Dawson, for example, continued to use ‘sheath’ to refer to both the new latex condom and the older rubber sheath, despite the fact that LRC was making attempts to distinguish its own latex condom from older models of sheaths. Instead, what mattered in the interwar period was manufacturers’ respectability and the perception of this respectability among both the contraceptive workforce and consumers.

Structured by Dawson’s investigations then, this chapter examines the blend of modern and traditional methods used to produce different types of rubber contraceptives in interwar Britain in the context of the manufactory and wider debates around respectability. In doing so, it reveals that latex production alone did not revolutionise the trade nor was it an immediate catalyst for demand. Indeed, the interwar changes that most affected production – the National Birth Control Association’s introduction of standardised contraceptive testing, the feminisation of the workforce and the outbreak of the Second World War – impacted latex and non-latex contraceptive manufacturers alike. As we will see, the contraceptive workforce not only represented firm respectability but was also an important barometer of the extent to which sexual and contraceptive knowledge was disseminated in the workplace.

Rubber manufacturing: the beginnings

By the time LRC introduced its latex condoms, rubber contraceptive manufacturing was well established in Britain. British manufacturing of general rubber goods first began in 1820 in Thomas Hancock’s London workshop, but the introduction of the vulcanisation process in the 1840s transformed rubber from a volatile substance into one that was stable and odourless, allowing more firms to more easily and safely produce all manner of rubber goods from flooring and footwear to washers and waterproof garments.⁸ Prompted by developments in vulcanisation, several entrepreneurs diversified into contraceptives. Friedrich Adolph Wilde reportedly designed the first rubber device to cover the cervix (a cervical cap or occlusive pessary) in 1838, while in 1842 W. P. J. Mensinga produced the first rubber diaphragm (or Dutch cap), a rubber device with a metal spring-loaded rim that covered the cervix by expanding against the walls of the vagina.⁹ The first vulcanised rubber sheath was reportedly produced in 1843 by moulding raw crepe and vulcanising it by burning sulphur, although some historians push the date back into the 1850s, with rubber penis tips being produced from 1858.¹⁰

While it is likely that a few of the first British contraceptive manufacturers gathered in the industrial districts of Manchester alongside Charles Macintosh’s famous waterproof garment factory, no fewer than eight contraceptive firms clustered around Hackney Wick by 1883.¹¹ Both Manchester and Hackney were key sites of small-scale rubber good production into the twentieth century. Firms in the workshop districts of Hackney Wick and nearby Dalston included those of James George Ingram, a Scottish engineer, who had established his manufactory in 1866, John George Franklin, established in 1864, and Edward Lambert and Son, established in 1877. Conveniently located next to the River Lea, workshops in Hackney Wick and Dalston were able to receive large shipments of rubber and to recruit from the abundance of local skilled and unskilled workers, some of whom were likely to have been Jewish. Increasing immigration had by the 1880s brought perhaps five thousand Jews to Dalston, making up over 20 per cent of Hackney’s residents. As we will see throughout this book, anti-Semitism within the British birth control movement (Marie Stopes being the most vocal anti-Semite) and among Christian moralists helped to justify and promote the trade’s disreputability.

Of the manufacturers of rubber goods that diversified into contraceptive goods, it was Lambert of Dalston that sold directly to the public and thus became the best known. Established as a contraceptive wholesaler in 1860, Lambert initially sold imported cervical caps, Mensinga diaphragms and sheaths made from rubber and from animal skin to a small number of retailers and consumers via mail order.¹² Lambert’s establishment of his own contraceptive manufactory in 1877 in two large mansions and two accompanying workshops on Queen’s Lane, Dalston, provided space, materials and machinery for the processes of rubber moulding and vulcanisation, and was prompted not only by a desire to move away from a reliance on imports but also to take advantage of the small but growing late nineteenth-century demand for contraceptives. Before the First World War the majority of people within all classes and age groups in society shared broadly similar negative attitudes to sex, but Lambert was able to draw on his seventeen years of experience in the wholesaling trade, its supply chains and customers in order to tap into and expand existing demand among a key market of middle- and upper-class married couples who were actively seeking to control their fertility. Indeed, Lambert’s transformation from wholesaler to manufacturer in 1877 was no coincidence. Manufacturing its own goods allowed the firm to exploit the small level of demand that resulted from the publicity surrounding the infamous trial of Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91) and Annie Besant (1847–1933) that found the pair guilty of publishing and distributing Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, and from the establishment of the Malthusian League, a largely middle-class neo-Malthusian movement with a small membership of over one thousand, which sought to control population through fertility regulation.¹³ However, Lambert’s success at tapping into and expanding contraceptive demand could only be assured through his appeal to physicians, surgeons, chemists, nurses and other forms of medical practitioner through the production and sale of all manner of medical rubber goods, including teats for feeding bottles, hot-water bottles, hernia trusses and urinals. The firm produced and promoted these medical goods alongside contraceptives, and thus could legitimately describe themselves as ‘surgical appliance makers’.

Lambert’s first contraceptives – syringes, seamless enemas, cervical caps and a range of rubber pessaries – appealed to both practitioners for their use in medical treatment and to married couples for birth control. With their ability to clean bodily orifices, syringes and enemas appealed to practit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: contraceptive commercialisation before the Pill
• 1 The dynamics of production: contraceptive manufacturing
• 2 Shaping markets: packaging, brands and trademarks
• 3 The print culture of contraceptives: advertising and the circulation of birth control knowledge
• 4 ‘As honest as business permits’: medical practitioners, birth control clinics and contraceptive efficacy
• 5 Over the counter and on the high street: contraceptive retailing in the urban landscape
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index