The more I think about contraception, the angrier I get, which is definitely the ideal state in which to compile a lighthearted review of its most outre visual history. But it’s all so unfair! Thousands of years of mansplaining, hypocrisy and manufactured moral outrage, resulting in a desperate story of death, injury, pain and poverty. It’s enough to put anyone into a terrible mood, plus my exploratory research threw up images I would not wish on my worst enemy. (Etsy chastity belts, I’m looking at you. Well, I’m not looking at you now and I wish I never had.)
Of course, people were trying everything they could think of to prevent pregnancy even before they had the dimmest understanding of how it came about. There was stuff you consumed, from “blacksmith water” – deliciously fortified with lead – to equally poisonous mercury. The Romans liked silphium, a now-extinct relative of giant fennel, so much so that it was celebrated on coins, while pennyroyal was recommended by the ancient Greek doctor Dioscorides and still sold as “relief for ladies” into the 20th century.
Emetics to “purge the desire for intercourse” were popular in Elizabethan times (and, yes, if you made me drink “radish root, agarick and saram boiled in barley water” it would probably do the trick). The pessaries were perhaps less likely to kill you, but my God they sound uncomfortable: cabbage or elephant dung? What’s the Farsi for “thrush”?
Before the arrival of vulcanised rubber condoms in the 1850s, the efforts of the family-planning pioneers Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes and approval for the pill in the late 1950s, things remained terrible. And it wasn’t only women who suffered from the woefulness of early contraception. The Elizabethans recommended anointing the penis with “rock salt, tar, balm, oil with white lead, sweet oil, juice of onion, balsam and sesame oil” and genital baths of ginger and vinegar, which sound quite painful and more like marinades than contraceptives. In the 17th century, the second Earl of Rochester wrote a poem about how great condoms (“cundums”) were, then died of a sexually transmitted disease.
On that cheery note, why not make yourself a nice beaver-testicle tea (a Canadian contraceptive) and take a look at some pictures from the bad old days. I think they might be the best contraceptive of all: they have definitely closed down whatever was left of my reproductive facilities for good.
The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, 1825BC
No, it’s not an actual contraceptive (although I have seen worse pessaries than scrunched-up papyrus), but this ancient Egyptian medical text takes lady complaints a lot more seriously than some doctors I have met. I particularly enjoy the section advising doctors that if a woman complains of “aching in her molars, her front and her ears”, you should tell her it’s “terrors of the womb”. Terrors of the womb! The next time I need to self-certify a medical absence, that’s what I will be putting. Anyway, its suggestions for preventing pregnancy are chopped crocodile dung or a sprinkle of honey. Tough choice.
Casanova blowing up a condom, 1754
Photograph: Apic/Getty Images
In addition to the condom that the self-declared superlover Giacomo Casanova is dicking around with here, his memoirs mention use of a hollowed-out lemon half as a diaphragm. Recent research suggests lemon juice has some spermicidal qualities, but Casanova must have had the pheromonal power of Pete Davidson to coax any right-thinking woman into that.
Sheep’s intestine condom, circa 1800
Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images
I would say there is a shred of justice in the awful texture and general disgustingness of historical condoms – fish bladder, linen, sheep intestine, leather – but the person being penetrated suffers as much as the wearer, so there isn’t. The historical condom that troubles me the most is the Japanese tortoiseshell model that just covered the glans. Wouldn’t you lose it? And don’t forget to wash your condom in warm milk, as the manual for a 17th-century Swedish condom instructed.
Chastity belt, 19th century
Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Guess what: chastity belts probably never existed. The medievalist Dr Albrecht Classen wrote a book explaining that the concept emerged from misinterpretations of allegorical or satirical textual references. The British Museum’s example is captioned “forgery” and the accompanying text states that most “were made in the 18th and 19th centuries as curiosities for the prurient, or as jokes for the tasteless”. The cute hole to poo through is a nice touch here that, regrettably, hasn’t gone unnoticed by Etsy’s weirdest crafters.
Stork postcard, early 20th century
The best contraceptive is abstinence (according to the 18th-century Presbyterian elder who lives in my head) – and what better dissuader than this postcard that reimagines the stork as a vengeful nightmare bird? Oh look, here come the pecky consequences of your actions. The beak on it! Imagining that near your reproductive parts would certainly have the desired effect.
Omega Spray vaginal douche, 1900-40
Photograph: Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images
I can see why the principle of the douche seemed sound – something went up there; let’s try to wash it out – but sperm are craftier (and faster) than that. Douches were popular, despite being basically useless, from the 16th century (Pope Sixtus V declared using one a sin worthy of excommunication in 1588) until the folkloric Coca-Cola variation of the 1950s. (Fun fact: in 2008, researchers found that Diet Coke kills far more sperm than the regular stuff.) Aargh! Your pH balance!
Raid on a birth control club, 1936
Photograph: Bettmann Archive
In 1873, the US effectively criminalised birth control via the Comstock Act by categorising contraceptives as obscene material. (Anti-abortion campaigners are trying to use the law now to ban the morning-after pill.) Until Griswold v Connecticut upheld a constitutional right to contraception in 1965, women were forced to resort to joining groups such as this New Jersey “birth control club”, where they paid $2 a month (about $45 today) in “insurance” – presumably meaning they could get an abortion if they needed one. The photo shows instruments confiscated in the raid.
Urethra stopper, circa 1920
Photograph: MUVS, Vienna
This is one of the worst of the bunch, described by its manufacturer, Gamic Genetic Laboratories of Northallerton in North Yorkshire, as “the first male internal contraceptive device”, created “after years of painstaking research”. Pain, yes, I bet. It was condemned by Stopes in her 1923 book on birth control as “wholly dangerous and absurd”.
Stem pessaries, 19th century
Photograph: Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images
I really don’t like the look of these, a German precursor of the modern intrauterine device that hung around until the 1940s. How big are they? (Enormous – approximately 15cm x 2cm, according to the Smithsonian.) Why do they look like darning mushrooms? (Apparently the mushroom head sat against the vaginal wall and the poky bits went in the uterus.) An absolutely sinister business – much like coil insertions today, amirite?
Gynodate, 1958
Photograph: MUVS, Vienna
This adorably discreet fertility tracker created by the Swiss clockmaker Jaquet doubled as a bedside clock. As well as the time, it showed fertile and infertile days in the menstrual cycle, plus the date of ovulation. Is it the most effective contraceptive? Certainly not. The chicest? Absolument.
