Black Market Birth Control:
Contraceptive Entrepreneurship
and Criminality in the Gilded Age

Andrea Tone

Sarah Chase's arrest in May 1878 caught her by surprise. For four years she had been selling contraceptives in Manhattan and Brooklyn without incident. A graduate of the Cleveland Homeopathic College, Chase had moved to Manhattan with her young daughter in 1874, earning a living lecturing on physiology and sexology to men's and women's groups at church and meeting halls. At the conclusion of her talks, Chase sold birth control, which she also advertised in circulars sent through the mail.1	1
Chase's activities violated an 1873 federal law that banned the dissemination and distribution of contraceptives through the mail or across state lines. In 1878 its chief enforcer, Anthony Comstock, chief agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and postal inspector by congressional appointment, plotted her arrest. Adopting the pseudonym Mr. Farnsworth, he wrote Chase and arranged a meeting at her home to purchase a douching syringe for his wife. The day after the sale, Comstock returned to Chase's dwelling with the detective James G. Howe of the Twenty-sixth Precinct, who pretended to need a syringe for his wife too. When Chase sold him one, Howe disclosed his true identity, served her with an arrest warrant, and seized six other syringes found on the premises. Comstock and Howe escorted Chase to the Tombs, the city jail, where she was released on fifteen hundred dollars bail. In a letter to his boss at the United States Post Office, Comstock derided Chase's gullibility. The contraceptive entrepreneur had misjudged her ability to "keep out of the clutches of the law."2	2
But it was Comstock who had miscalculated. At Chase's hearing, an all-male grand jury decided there was insufficient evidence to warrant a trial. Comstock was outraged and demanded a second hearing. The prosecuting attorney refused. Not to be thwarted, Comstock sneaked into the grand jury room and persuaded the foreman to sign two bills of indictment Comstock had prepared. The prosecutor reprimanded him and then entered a nolle prosequi for both indictments at Chase's arraignment, formally dismissing all charges. Chase picked up where the prosecutor left off. She filed a ten thousand–dollar civil suit against Comstock for false arrest.3	3
Although Chase lost the countersuit, it was she, not Comstock, who emerged the victor in their frequent skirmishes. Between 1878 and 1900 Chase was arrested five times. Only once, when a patient died following an abortion, did arrest lead to a jail term for Chase; that conviction was not for birth control, but for abortion. Significantly, Chase's imprisonment did not affect her views or business practices. After her release she resumed her open endorsement and sale of contraceptives. On June 4, 1900, she was again arrested by Comstock on the charge of circulating articles to prevent conception. Once again, a grand jury refused to indict her. As in the past, Chase's brush with the law left her free to continue her trade in black market birth control.4	4
We know little about Sarah Chase and other contraceptive entrepreneurs who carried on their businesses after birth control became a crime. Scholars who have studied the modern birth control movement have typically framed its history as a tale of physicians, policy makers, and reproductive rights activists. As a result, we know a lot about such figures as Margaret Sanger, legal impediments to reproductive rights, and the medicalization of contraception but little about the business of birth control as it evolved from an illicit trade into one of the most successful "legitimate" industries in American history.5	. . .