Condom Week 2011

From its inception, the condom has been a morally ambiguous object. Does it serve to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease, or is its chief function birth control? Well, either or both, actually. Its meaning and significance are socially constructed.

For the Handerson Lecture by Alexandra Lord on January 27, we prepared an exhibit of WPA era anti VD posters, 1937-43, curated by CIA biomedical art student Stephen Beuhrer. Additionally, Dittrick staff mounted a display of condom containers from the Skuy Collection dating from this period and these artifacts document important changes in condom manufacture and marketing. The 1930s and 1940s witnessed the rise of latex condoms, the beginnings of FDA testing, and a consequent shake-up of the condom making trade, leaving Julius Schmid and Youngs Rubber as dominant in the American marketplace.

During World War I American soldiers and sailors were counseled to keep clean and abstinent on their furloughs. If and when they had sex, they were issued small “Dough-boy Prophylactic” kits containing mercurial ointment for post-coital cleanup.

More widespread use of the condom began with a landmark case involving Margaret Sanger and the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. In 1918 Judge Frederick Crane of the court of appeals of New York affirmed the legality of contraceptives used for disease prevention. Before that time the Comstock Act had effectively criminalized birth control, including the condom, by banning the distribution of contraceptive information. The Crane decision neutralized the Comstock Act, at least with regard to condoms.

This gave condom makers their marketing slant in the 1920s and 30s: stress the disease preventive qualities of the condom, with only a wink at its contraceptive purpose. And make them available only through “ethical” druggists.

Julius Schmid, a German immigrant, first started making condoms (both skin sheaths and rubbers) during the black market era of Comstock. By 1930 he could openly register the trademark names Ramses and Sheik with the U.S. Patent Office, and the condom business made him a millionare.

The imagery of Egypt and Saudi Arabia might well have been inspired by the popularity of Rudolph Valentino and his dashing role in The Sheik (1921).

Youngs Rubber began condom manufacture in 1916, started selling Trojan condoms in 1920, and trademarked the brand in 1927. A tough battle in the courts to protect the Trojan brand effectively legitimized condoms for disease prevention.

Youngs marketed the Trojan line in pharmaceutical journals, guaranteeing the highest product quality among condom makers. In 1933 Youngs adopted machinery designed by Frederick Killian of Akron for mass production of latex condoms on a conveyor line. Latex (milky liquid tapped from rubber trees) condoms quickly emerged as viable rival to rubber products.

A real turning point, coincident with the WPA era anti-syphilis campaign by the U.S. Public Health Service and the American Social Hygiene Association, came with FDA testing of condoms. In 1937 FDA announced intent to begin inspections, which commenced in January 1938. Quickly, the leaders Schmid and Youngs rose above other brands, buoyed by their superior product and quality control. Arthur Youngs of the Trojan brand introduced a condom producing machine that did testing as an integral part of the manufacturing process.

Many condoms made by other companies, notably Texide and Dean, had an unacceptable failure rate, leading to the cessation of production by those companies between 1938 and 1941. That effectively left the field to industry giants Schmid and Youngs.

Celebrating Condom Week at the Dittrick.

Just around the corner we have a couple of events for Condom Week 2011. On Monday February 14 Science Cafe Cleveland wlll present Cloaking Cupid's Arrow: contraception and reproductive science at Great Lakes Brewing Co. I'll be talking about the history of contraception and my friend Tony Tizzano, M.D., will discuss contemporary reproductive science and technology. Join us! Drinks start at 6:30PM in the Tasting Room of GLBC at 2701 Carroll Avenue, off West 25th near the Westside Market. Program starts at 7:00PM

And earlier in the day on the 14th, tune into The Sound of Ideas on WCPN, Cleveland's NPR affiliate. Tony and I will discuss the history and science of contraception. Listen to the live audiostream on 90.3 FM beginning at 9:00AM.

Then, on Saturday February 19 Planned Parenthood of Northeast Ohio is hosting National Condom Week Party at the Dittrick, from 6 to 8 PM. See the PPNEO website for details.

Jim Edmonson

p.s. - there's plenty written on the condom, but not much good cultural history. Here are some exceptionally thoughtful and interesting offerings:

Joshua Gamson, "Rubber Wars: Struggles over the Condom in the United States," Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 262-282.

Paul Jobling, "Playing Safe: The Politics of Pleasure and Gender in the Promotion of Condoms in Britain." Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 53-70.

Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (2001), esp. Chap. 8: Condom Kings pp.183-202.

Sleeping with Uncle Sam

Sex education. For most Americans, these two simple words conjure up diverse images: the gym, the inept health teacher, the snickers, the embarrassment, and, most important, the confusion. Alexandra Lord will explore this topic at the Dittrick on Thursday January 27. Her lecture, Sleeping With Uncle Sam: Federally Funded Sex Education and the American Public documents a century long struggle to create sex education programs balancing both cultural and public health concerns. In doing so, she will explore how and why sex education -- a teenage rite of passage in America -- became such an explosive topic.

Alexandra Lord (PhD, University of Wisconsin) taught medical history and served as historian of the United States Public Health Service through 2007. In January 2008, she became the Branch Chief of the National Historic Landmarks Program, and serves on the Board of the National Council on Public History. Her latest book, Condom Nation: The U. S. Government’s Sex Education Campaign from World War I to the Age of the Internet (Johns Hopkins, 2010) won awards from the British Medical Association as the best popular book on medicine and as the best book furthering public understanding of medicine and science.

Inspired by Alexandra Lord’s visit, the Dittrick staff, in association with CIA student Stephen Buehrer, has prepared a temporary exhibit, The Art of Prevention: Venereal Disease Posters, 1935-1950 in the Castele Gallery. The U. S. Public Health Service and the privately operated American Social Hygiene Association, commissioned artists working under the WPA (Works Progress Administration) to design posters for their campaign against venereal disease. The lithographed posters, mostly produced from 1936 to 1942, were distributed by state and local boards of health, and public health and safety programs. Digital copies of posters came from the Library of Congress, the Wellcome Library, and the American Social Hygiene Association archive at the University of Minnesota. The images seen here are from the Library of Congress.

See also the online exhibit The Enemy in Your Pants. The military’s decades-long war against STDs. By Elizabeth Gettelman and Mark Murrmann.

Jim Edmonson

Storks: symbols of fecundity or harbingers of unwanted pregnancy?

Upon entering the exhibition Virtue, vice, and contraband: a history of contraception in America, you are greeted by imagery of storks, bearing infants, being beaten back or evaded by women who didn’t relish the prospect of motherhood. Such images are perhaps unexpected, but are indeed part and parcel of the iconography of both reproduction and contraception.

Storks atop a tower in Kayersberg, Haut Rhin (Alsace)

The stork, a symbol of fecundity, luck, and prosperity widely used across Europe, has for centuries been associated with childbirth. In Alsace (my favorite part of France) it is the symbol of that French region (more specifically the Haut Rhin département), and indeed storks perch atop spires and chimneys across the countryside. When confronted with the perennial question of where babies come from (awkward!!), a quick parental out is simply to say that “the stork brought them.”

This explanation found visual expression in postcards and announcements sent by prospective and new parents upon the occasion of childbirth. As the predominant icon of childbirth, the stork is closely followed by caggage-patch babies (how many of us recall the frantic parental search for “cabbage patch” dolls at Christmas in the 80s?). Both stork and cabbage patch images are found in abundance in a wonderful book entitled D'où viennent les bébés? by Laura Jaffe and Conce Codina. I came across this book at the Musée Flaubert in Rouen last September and bought a copy for the Dittrick.

Guest curator of Virtue, vice, and contraband Jimmy Meyer collected quite a few postcards with stork iconography, and added them to the Skuy collection last year. Along with the bouyant, cheerful stork images came some less cheery in character -- images of women (and their partners) frantically fending off or fleeing the stork. These postcards showed that not everyone desired a large family, and many eagerly sought some effective and safe way to achieve that goal.

Jim Edmonson

A walk through “Virtue, vice, and contraband.”

For the next several posts, I am going to take you on a walk through the Dittrick’s interpretive exhibition, “Virtue, vice, and contraband: a history of contraception in America.” Along the way, we’ll linger to look closer at particular items -- rare books, images, and artifacts. It’s the largest and most comprehensive exhibit on this topic in North America, and show cases the Percy Skuy collection on the history of contraception that came to the Dittrick in late 2004.

I first saw the Skuy collection in Toronto, at the Janssen Ortho headquarters, and found it quirky, amusing, and informative. Never in my wildest imagination did I think that collection would come our way. Then, in the summer of 2003 Percy called and wanted to know if the Dittrick might wish to provide a home to his collection. It wasn’t a done deal; Percy was in conversation with at least two other museums. But I felt that we had much to offer and mounted a concerted pitch to set forth our cause. The happy outcome: the collection came to Cleveland.



Our next step? Work through the re-interpretation and installation of the Skuy collection in its own dedicated space. That finally came to pass last September when we opened “Virtue, vice, and contraband: a history of contraception in America.” In time, we will offer a virtual version of the exhibition on the Skuy collection website. For the moment, however, I will take you on a stroll through the display, highlighting the curious and the rare, as well as the banal and commonplace. It’s all grist for the mill in our museum, and I can guarantee you that you won’t see this stuff elsewhere. The Skuy collection is one of a kind.

Jim Edmonson

Shoo stork image courtesy of Deanna Dahlsad

Leo J. Latz and "The Rhythm"

Leo J. Latz, a Chicago doctor, first championed the Ogino-Knaus approach in the United States. He contended that the “findings of modern science disclose a rational, natural, and ethical means to space births and to regulate intelligently the number of children.” In 1932 Latz published The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women, which sold over 200,000 copies by 1942, and thus "rhythm" made its way into modern parlance. Latz also shared his approach with the medical community via an article in JAMA in 1935.

Latz advised avoiding intercourse for eight days: for women with a regular menstrual cycle, this began five days before ovulation, with an extra three days tacked on for safety’s sake. As a devout Roman Catholic, Latz advanced this method of fertility control as more in line with Church teachings. He published pamphlets on rhythm for priests to distribute to couples, and parish bingo games gave out his book as a prize. Many shared Leo Latz’s faith in the science behind the Ogino-Knaus findings. But applying them to birth control proved not so simple, nor straightforward. Calculating the time of ovulation can still be tricky. It varies from woman to woman, and a woman can ovulate at a different time each month. Stress, illness, or interruptions in normal routine can also alter a woman’s cycle. Despite these uncertainties, the Ogino-Knaus method caught on, as evidenced by the proliferation of rhythm method calculators after 1930. Companies produced graphs, wheels, calendars, and slide rules, which cost from 10¢ to $5.

Despite Latz's enthusiasm, The Catholic Medical Guardian reported in 1935 that “the calculation of the ‘sterile period’ is never easy and in many cases appears to be impossible.” Interest yet remained, and in 1951 Pope Pius XII sanctioned the Rhythm Method as a “natural” method of regulating procreation. In 1955 over 65% of Catholic women surveyed said they used Rhythm.

Ironically, Leo Latz felt biting backlash for all his efforts to bring an acceptable form of contraception to Catholics. Some felt he went too far. When Latz published The Rhythm in 1932 he served on the medical faculty of Loyola University. According to Leslie Tentler, writing in Catholics and Contraception: An American History (2004), Latz "was abruptly fired from that position in August of 1934," and this action "was almost certainly a direct result of Latz's prominent association with the cause of rhythm." In 1935 Latz confessed to his friend Father Joseph Reiner, S.J., that no one "knew the anguish and dishonor I ...suffered, when people said: 'I heard you were thrown out of the University."

Jim Edmonson

Artifacts in focus : rhythm method calculators

Advertisement for Thurston Scott Welton, The modern method of birth control. New York, W. J. Black [c1935]. Included "The calendar-wheel for finding fertile and sterile dates" in pocket on inside of front cover. Image courtesy of Paula Viterbo.

Learning through the artifact.

One of the great things about working with an important museum collection is that you’re always learning. And boy, with the Percy Skuy Collection on the history of contraception did we have a lot of learning to do! I’d like to share some of the fruits of that learning process by featuring a selection of objects, showcasing some of the more intriguing artifacts that are now on display in our thematic exhibition, Virtue, vice, and contraband: a history of contraception in America.

The Skuy collection is illustrative of several facets of medical artifact collections. First, most visitors are simply amazed at the variety of contraceptives, but this proves to be true of many medical technologies (viz: over 600 variants of OB forceps appeared from the 17th century through the 20th centuries). Contraceptives also provide evidence of significant scientific inquiry and innovation involved in medical technologies, although much of this is a 20th century phenomenon. And lastly, our work with the Skuy collection brought a fuller appreciation of a growing body of scholarship in this domain. These points are well illustrated by a curious set of objects: rhythm method calculators.

Frankly, when we started work on reinterpreting the Skuy collection, I didn’t expect to focus on the rhythm method, and its associated calculating devices. Oh, I knew about rhythm, thanks to my Irish-American mother-in-law, who saw to it that my wife and I got a packet from the Catholic Social Services agency where she worked in Wilmington, Delaware. The packet didn’t get read closely, and in time the packet ended up in the Dittrick’s collection around 1981.

So, as we mapped out the Skuy collection gallery, I expected to give only a passing nod to rhythm. But as we sorted through the collection quite a number of calculators surfaced, chiefly from the 1930s-1960s. This surprised me, and I looked into why so many such items existed and what they tell us about contraceptive technologies.

Conception is central to the human experience, yet for centuries the process remained misunderstood. Doctors giving contraceptive advice in the 19th century often recommended having sex only during the "safe period," when a woman was not ovulating. But before 1930 (and even after), most physicians misidentified the time of ovulation. By studying animal behavior, they thought women were "safe" from pregnancy at the midpoint of the menstrual cycle. This is in fact when women are most likely to conceive.

This changed markedly in the 1920s when Kyusaku Ogino in Japan and Hermann Knaus in Austria studied ovulation carefully. They concluded that it normally occurs from 12 to 16 days before the onset of the menstrual period. They also asserted that an unfertilized ovum had a brief life, probably less than a day. At last, it seemed, the “safe period” could be more accurately determined. And this precipitate a spate of inventive activity, with many calculators being designed, patented, copyrighted, and produced in the ensuing decades.

These developments are the subject of an important dissertation by Paula Viterbo, an editor on the Thomas Jefferson papers. Viterbo’s work is entitled "The Promise of Rhythm: The Determination of the Woman's Time of Ovulation and Its Social Impact in the United States, 1920-1940," State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2000; I also commend her article “I got rhythm: Gershwin and birth control in the 1930s,” that appeared in Endeavor in 2004. She kindly helped us by reviewing our exhibit section on rhythm, and attended the opening of the Skuy gallery last September.

In a coming post I will present some specific examples of these calculators that now appear in the Skuy gallery.

Jim Edmonson