Book Review

The best historians are great detectives, able both to ferret out facts hidden beneath the apparent surface of events and to construct new narratives that make those facts convincing. Andrea Tone is such a historian. To the charge of shaping the birthrate of Americans between 1873 and 1970 she has nailed a new suspect and has, to this jury, freed both known defendants: "Victorian repression," on the one hand, and Margaret Sanger and her physicians, on the other. In their place come a host of manufacturers and distributors of contraceptive materials, alert to new technologies and markets, selling over the counter to Americans of all social classes and ethnic groups.

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The author employs superb research skills to investigate questions of business and social history in three periods: the black market era of the late nineteenth century, the time of growing legitimacy during the first half of the twentieth, and the years of new technology and medicalization following World War II. Drawing effectively on trade journals, business records, personal papers, medical studies, credit reports, and arrest records, Tone demonstrates what Americans did rather than what they were told to do. In the early era, laws making the sale of contraceptives illegal hardly dented a brisk contraceptive business in condoms, female syringes, powders, pessaries, and womb veils. In the middle years, when the birth control movement advocated the physician-fitted diaphragm, very few chose it over condoms and douches, the preferred commercial products. Narration of the third period of the birth control pill and intrauterine devices (IUDs), previously told in the heroic mode, here finds useful skepticism: the growing authority of doctors displacing that of clerks and neighbors brought losses as well as gains.

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