Birth control is not new. The methods used by the ancient Greeks – abstinence, abortion, withdrawal and extended breastfeeding – remained the commonest forms of fertility-limitation until the arrival of the oral contraceptive and the IUD in the 1960s. Condoms (made of linen, animal bladders, or fine skins) were in use from the late sixteenth century. But since they were regarded mainly as a safeguard against venereal disease (and were available in brothels in several European capitals by the end of the eighteenth century), they remained disreputable.

Public defence of birth control is first found in late-eighteenth century France. In the early nineteenth century it drew strongly on the theories of Malthus (see p. 54). It was not, at first, linked with women’s rights but with restriction of the irresponsible fertility of the poor. The introduction of a relatively reliable ‘scientific’ female contraceptive may have helped to change this emphasis during the later nineteenth century. By 1918 Marie Stopes was arguing, in her bestseller Married Love, that the wife had as much right to sexual pleasure as her husband, and she opened the first English birth control clinic in London’s Holloway Road in March 1921.

This extract is from Angus McLaren’s History of Contraception (1990).

The invention of the diaphragm did represent a significant innovation in fertility control. Nineteenth-century doctors popularized the use of pessaries to correct prolapsed uteruses; it was a short step to employ them as a barrier method of birth control. Such a device was presumably what Dr Edward B. Foote meant when referring to an Indian-rubber ‘womb veil’. The German physician W. P. J. Mensinga provided a clearer account of his diaphragm in 1882; a soft rubber shield which the woman inserted into the vagina to block entry to the uterus. Mensinga’s explicit intent was to protect unhealthy women from undesired pregnancies. The diaphragm was, when accompanied by douching, an effective female contraceptive; unfortunately its expense and the fact that it had to be fitted by a physician long restricted its use to a middle-class clientele.

Commercial houses began at the turn of the century to develop acidic powders and jellies to block and kill sperm. Easier to use was the soluble quinine pessary or suppository developed by the Rendell company in England in the 1880s and popularized by Dr Henry Arthur Allbutt. Similar home-made products which countered conception with both a barrier and a spermicide were soon being made from cocoa butter or glycerine by innovative housewives across Europe and North America.

Diaphragms and pessaries to be fully effective had to be followed by douching. Douching after intercourse with a vaginal syringe to destroy ‘the fecundating property of the sperm by chemical agents’ was recommended by the Massachusetts doctor Charles Knowlton in his Fruits of Philosophy, published in 1832. Knowlton was prosecuted for obscenity, but his douching advice was repeated by others, such as Frederick Hollick in 1850 in his Marriage Guide. Simple cold water was suggested by some; Knowlton stressed the need to add a restringent or acidic agent such as alum, various sulphates or vinegar. Douches, like diaphragms, were regarded as providing a woman with contraceptive independence. By mid-century they were readily available in pharmacies and drug stores and sold via respectable mail-order catalogues, purportedly for purposes of hygiene. They were, for this reason, promoted by the German Health Insurance Programme and provided free to members of local Funds. Douching did entail expenses and required both a privacy and a water supply that was not available to many working-class couples. Perhaps this was just as well, since simply douching after intercourse was in fact less effective than coitus interruptus.

In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, contraceptives and abortifacients were advertised in newspapers and magazines, sold in barber shops, rubber good stores and pharmacies, and brought to villages by itinerant pedlars and to working-class neighbourhoods by door-to-door hucksters. Irish doctors were astonished at the display by London chemists of ‘antigestatory appliances’ and ‘orchitological literature’.