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Andrea Tone. Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. vii + 366 pp. ISBN 0-8090-3817-X, $30.00 (cloth); 0-8090-3816-1, $15.00 (paper).
What happens when we view birth control as a business? The rewards are rich, as Andrea Tone's Devices and Desires elegantly demonstrates. Tone begins with the Comstock Act of 1873, which classified contraceptives as "obscene," prohibiting their transportation across state lines or their dissemination through the mails. Early twentieth-century judicial decisions upheld the use of contraceptives for the purposes of preventing disease, but birth control used as birth control did not become legal in all states until the 1960s (not until 1972 did the U.S. Supreme Court affirm the contraceptive rights of unmarried couples).
Tone's most significant achievement is her irrefutable demonstration that this legal history, taken at face value, is at best misleading. Black market birth control flourished during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-because consumers demanded it and because state and federal governments provided few funds for enforcement. Contraceptive entrepreneurs successfully peddled old merchandise under new names. Condoms became "rubber goods for gents," pessaries, "married women's friends." Prosecution was highly selective. Comstock and his minions pursued small-scale vendors...