“Those who have used them always have them with them,” assured a New York Times advertisement 155 years ago. It was 1861 and people were reading for the first time how someone was praising condoms, even though Charles Goodyear had already figured out how to vulcanise rubber in 1839 and patented the process five years later. Condoms quickly became popular, even though they were not really a novelty. One of the earliest condoms was made from pig intestines, and the manual for its use said that it should be soaked in warm milk before use.
This was just one of the amusing ways lovers today tried to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies. The indomitable Casanova “made” his own diaphragm by cutting a lemon in half, squeezing it partially and inserting the squeezed out half into the woman’s vagina. This provided a physical barrier to prevent the sperm from spreading, although some believe that this was mainly an attempt to protect himself from sexually transmitted diseases. He also protected himself with lemon juice, believing it to destroy sperm.
The miraculous power of citrus fruits was also believed in by ancient Jewish women. Before intercourse, they soaked a sponge in lemon juice and inserted it into their vagina to act as a physical and chemical barrier to sperm.
Experts at the time also recommended that women wash with lemon juice immediately after sex to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but this was not the most effective method. After intercourse, women had only a few minutes to rinse themselves off, and then the sperm had already travelled to where nothing else could live.
Citrus fruits were supposedly not used to promote abortions in ancient times, but are recommended today. Some “experts” advise women who are less than four weeks pregnant to take a large dose of vitamin C every day – 6 to 10 grams a day – and they will have miscarriages by accident.
How to avoid pregnancy?
Wild carrots, which Hippocrates wrote about, had no effect on the foetus, but were supposedly an effective contraceptive. Its seeds stopped the synthesis of progesterone, and it was also very handy as an emergency protection, i.e. as a ‘morning-after pill’. The only condition was that the woman had to consume the seeds of the wild carrot no more than eight hours after sexual intercourse.
But she could take it with peace of mind because it had no side effects. Few women were troubled by constipation, but none suffered any lasting effects when they stopped eating carrots. The only danger they faced was that they might mistake the plant for a poisonous or watery tuber and be poisoned.
The peppermint-flavoured polay plant, used by the ancient Greeks and Romans as a spice and to enhance the flavour of wine, was easily identified. They used it, among other things, to make a tea to try to speed up menstruation and induce abortion. These two supposed effects landed polay in the medical encyclopaedias of the time, but women had to be careful with it. There is so much poison in the plant that women’s internal organs could easily fail if they drank too much of the tea.
In the Americas, indigenous women have tried to avoid unwanted births with the plant Caulophyllum thalictroides. The two ingredients in it did not act as contraceptives, but as abortion inducers. One mimicked the hormone secreted by the female body during childbirth, stimulating the uterus to contract, and the other had a similar effect. Today, midwives reportedly use the growth in the last month of pregnancy to prepare the uterus for miscarriage.
Women have also had abortions with Chinese angelica. Its effect on female hormones has been known for centuries, so women have brewed potions from its roots to treat irregular menstruation. If consumed at the beginning of pregnancy, the root was thought to trigger uterine contractions and miscarriage.
European and American angelica have similar properties to Chinese angelica, but have never been used as widely as Chinese angelica.
Contraceptive salad
The wine roulette used to be much more popular. This ornamental, very hardy and rather bitter plant was also used in small quantities in cooking. Women in Latin America used to put it in salads, not for its taste, but as a protection against conception.
If they consumed it regularly, their endometrium was less well supplied with blood, so there was not enough food in the layer around the uterus and the egg did not fertilise. But if they brewed a tea from the vine, it meant they needed a “morning-after pill”.
Soranus, a 2nd century Greek gynaecologist, prescribed it mainly as a powerful abortifacient, but also advised women to be abstinent during menstruation, believing that the menstrual period was the most fertile time of the month for them. He also advised them to hold their breath during intercourse and then sneeze to prevent the sperm from reaching the womb.
The ancient medical manual Ebers Papyrus, written around 1550 BC, also advised women to mix honey, dates and acacia bark into a paste. The cream should be applied to a cotton cloth and inserted into the vagina. This, it said, will prevent sperm from going where they should not go.
Crocodile faeces
In Egypt, women mixed honey with sodium carbonate and crocodile droppings. They made an almost hard paste and inserted it into their vaginas before sex. It was only much later that it was found that crocodile mud affected the acidity of the body, making it even more likely that they would get pregnant.
American slaves did not go for honey, but for cotton. So they chewed the bark of its root to protect themselves from conception, with considerable success.
Women in South and Southeast Asia trusted the immature papaya. The chemical compounds in it affected progesterone and acted as contraceptives, and papaya seeds were also an effective male protection. If consumed regularly by men, they reportedly reduced sperm counts to zero, but only temporarily. When they stopped consuming them, there were as many sperm as before.
The aniseed plant Silphium was apparently so effective as a contraceptive that Pliny the Elder recommended that women should only consume a solution of it once a month and be safe. If they drank it the morning after intercourse, conception was supposedly impossible.
Silphium was then abundant on the coasts of present-day Libya, but after the second century it was no more. Because it was so important to the local economy as a medicine and a spice that it even found its way onto coins, it was apparently successfully eradicated.
However, the belief that mercury is an excellent contraceptive has survived for a very long time. It was used by everyone from the ancient Greeks to the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians to treat everything from rashes to syphilis and as a contraceptive.
It put so much stress on women’s bodies that they miscarried, and years of mercury exposure caused kidney and lung failure, brain cell death and death. In the case of Chinese concubines, the decline was even faster because they used a mixture of mercury and lead for protection.
But contraception was perfectly safe, and in the 10th century Persian women were advised to jump seven or nine times after intercourse, because it would help them expel the sperm.
In the Middle Ages, European women did not have to jump, but weasel testicles were recommended to protect them. They had to be tied around the thighs during intercourse.
Rebel
But the history of contraception has not only been humorous, it has also been personal. “Because of you!”, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) blamed her father for her mother’s death. She loved him, but as they stood by her open grave, all she saw before her was the image of her mother, embittered, exhausted and sick. She had died at the age of fifty, having become pregnant eighteen times and cared for eleven surviving children.
Her then barely adult daughter has never forgotten how her mother slowly faded away. She made her a nurse, and she made her watch women die in childbirth, lose their lives trying to have illegal abortions, or live in eternal fear of a new pregnancy, who knows which one.
It was 1912, when Margaret dreamt of a miracle pill that would prevent unwanted births. Ancient forms of contraception were either outdated or unknown to women, as all forms of contraception were banned by law in America in 1873. Under the Comstock Act, named after Anthony Comstock, who started the drive against alleged obscenity, the dissemination of information about contraception was also banned, and this applied to doctors too.
While the authorities could not prosecute the English phrase birth control or contraception, coined by Margaret in 1914, they could prosecute her for spreading forbidden contraceptive knowledge and advocating family planning.
She was soon accused of breaking the Comstock Act by starting a monthly magazine, The Woman Rebel, which taught women about contraception. She would have faced a jury if she had not left the country, but she returned in 1916 and opened the first family planning clinic in America.
It had only been open for a week and a half when she was forced to close it, but Sanger did not give up. Five years later, she founded the American League for Contraception, which later became the American Family Planning Federation.
Women believed in Sanger, even though in the mid-1930s Pope Pius XI declared that contraceptive use was one of the great sins. Nevertheless, Time magazine reported in 1935 that “Contraception has become big business, and 300 manufacturers are engaged in it …”.
In reality, desperate women were sold anything they could think of as contraception, especially hygiene products. One of the more unusual methods of preventing pregnancy that was advertised was certainly the use of Coca-Cola. After intercourse, the woman had to wash herself with it, because it would destroy the sperm.
In America, things only improved somewhat in 1937, when the infamous law was repealed, although contraception continued to be persecuted in most countries. Nevertheless, by 1942, there were already 800 clinics, and Margaret Sanger had a hand in them too.
A pill for good luck
She was not wealthy herself, but her friend Katherine McCormick (1875-1967) was. One of the few women allowed to study at the time, she inherited $15 million in 1947 after the death of her husband, who suffered from schizophrenia.
So she and Margaret had the money and the goal – to find the “pill” – and now all they needed was an expert to help them get there. When they contacted Dr Gregory Pincus in 1952, he had been researching the hormone system for several years, but he had not synthesised the progesterone from the yam tuber.
Chemists Frank Colton and Carl Djerassi had done it before him, unbeknown to each other, but no one before Pincus had thought of using it for hormonal protection against unwanted pregnancies.
He, with McCormick’s financial help, started testing it on animals, and his deeply religious colleague John Rock, who had been helping supposedly infertile women, started testing it on them. But to study how progesterone works, they had to go to Puerto Rico. They were still banned in America.
When they proved progesterone to be effective in 1957, it was only allowed to be used to treat gynaecological problems. Its contraceptive effectiveness was illegal until May 1960, when the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) approved the contraceptive pill under the name Enovid.
“They won’t remember her,” those who opposed her were convinced. Why would a woman remember to take a pill at the same time for 21 days in a row if she is not even ill? For good reason, and so it was used by one and a half million women in 1961 and 6.5 million in 1965, even though some also experienced unpleasant side effects – dizziness, vomiting, weight gain and dangerous blood clots – due to too much progesterone.
Officially, all Envid users were either married or suffering from gynaecological problems. The law banning married women from using oral contraceptives was abolished in 1965, but it was not until 1972 that unmarried women were able to breathe freely sexually.
“No medical phenomenon in America has ever been so overwhelmingly embraced as the oral contraceptive pill, now universally known as ‘the pill’,” wrote Tim 50 years ago.
By 1977, 70% of married American women aged between 15 and 44 were using contraception, and the ‘pill’ soon spread worldwide. Today, more than 100 million women rely on them, making them one of the greatest advances of the last century, but figures from 2012 show that 222 million women in underdeveloped or developing countries still lack access.
No more maternity?
What would happen if we had one? In the last 50 years, America has seen a remarkable increase in women’s education, thanks in part to the Pill. Women no longer have to interrupt their studies to get pregnant, they are more equal in the labour market, and since they are not having ten or more children, their health is much better and their mortality rate in childbirth is lower.
The Pill has also changed women’s attitudes to sex, but this has not led to promiscuity, although some blame the Pill for the sexual revolution.
Opponents of contraception, who usually come from church circles, accuse the pill of turning sex into a pleasure-seeking activity. This is a sin, because the aim of sex should be to conceive a child, and pleasure should be a positive side-effect to encourage the couple to be active.
When the pill enabled sex that did not lead to conception, the partners no longer saw each other as potential parents, the bond between them frayed and the woman lost the joy of motherhood, they say.
Simple oral contraception is thought to lead to promiscuity, although on the other hand it was once hoped that it would reduce divorce rates because wives, freed from the fear of unwanted pregnancy, would be more active in the home bed.
The Catholic Church has consistently opposed contraception and continues to do so, even though research shows that 96% of religious women have used some form of protection at some time in their lives, which the Church considers sinful.
The Pill was also accused of being a tool of the powerful to slowly exterminate the weaker races, while others expected it to control population growth and reduce famine.
The Pill, which contains far fewer hormones today than in the past, has formally given women the power to decide their own lives and how many children they have and when, but it is still not a right that can be exercised everywhere. In America, for example, doctors can again refuse to prescribe the contraceptive pill on the basis of moral and religious objections, and not just on medical grounds.
Contraception for a better life
And Beate Uhse, a German, was very familiar with contraception, even though she was neither a doctor nor an activist. In post-war Germany, pregnancy was a luxury that women could not afford, but they knew almost nothing about their own bodies and even less about forms of contraception. They could not have been enthusiastic about condoms, which were more or less banned for civilian use by the Nazis in 1941.
Beate Uhse instinctively sensed that contraception and eroticism could be a way out of the misery she was living in alone with her child. The only key to success was that she had to sell it subtly enough to keep her reputation. She began to build her own erotic empire.
As the daughter of one of Germany’s first female doctors, she had a wealth of knowledge. Growing up on an estate in what was then East Prussia, sex education was on her agenda, because her mother believed it was part of general education.
Beate Köstlin, as she was then known, made good use of her mother’s libertarian attitude to life. Fascinated by aeroplanes, she passed her test and obtained her licence at the age of 18, became Germany’s first female pilot and appeared as a double in films. A year later, she married her instructor Hans-Jürgen Uhse, but was widowed at the age of twenty-four.
During the Second World War, she and her husband were conscripted, as were all licensed pilots. He had to go to the battlefield, she did not, because she was a woman. He was in a fatal plane crash in 1944, but she survived and was left alone with their son Klaus, who had been born the year before.
She had to take care of him, if only by stealing a plane when the Russians began to approach Berlin in April 1945, loading her son and nanny into it and fleeing to the west. She ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp, but was soon released.
The only problem was that she didn’t have the means to survive. She was not allowed to fly for the next 12 years, but she was able to work on a farm and deal with the black market, while chatting with women and learning about their fears of unwanted pregnancies. At first she gave them counselling, then she started teaching them about sex and contraception.
They could order brochures by mail, and choose condoms together with their spouses in a catalogue she was about to publish. Beate Uhse knew that eroticism had to be wrapped in decent paper, so she presented it as “marital hygiene” to enable couples to find happiness and pleasure in the home bed without fear of pregnancy.
Law rescuer
She explained to her opponents, who came from powerful Church ranks, that she was saving the law. She repeated the same in the courts, where she was a regular guest, because her business was on the verge of being legal. She had to defend herself in as many as 3,000 lawsuits, but she never lost a single one, because she insisted that she was only helping the couple to harmony together.
It has never made a distinction between the sexes. Both sexes want the same thing, she argued, but ignorance and the unavailability of contraception stand in the way.
But she didn’t just explain her business, she stood behind it. She was never ashamed of it and never denied it. She defended it with her name and her face and her life story, presenting herself as a mother and a wife who, like everyone else, lives in deprivation and in fear of new hungry mouths.
In 1949, she remarried Ernst-Walter Roetmund, gave birth to a second son in the same year and adopted her husband’s child from a previous marriage as her own. People easily identified with her and, because of her family, the authorities were not as harsh towards her as they could have been.
She fought battle after battle against the conservative moral norms that pervaded the people, and consolidated the foundations of her business until she opened the world’s first sex shop in 1962.
That’s when she proudly stood in front of the cameras. Not only to help raise the profile of her erotic products, but also because she enjoyed the limelight, and even more so because she was able to explain things to journalists in carefully chosen words, so that they could publish them even in a time that was not favourable to eroticism. She became a celebrity with 200 employees.
Her business flourished and her marriage withered. Ernst-Walter Roetmund did not imagine sexual pleasures only in the home bed, and so the liberal Beate Uhse divorced in 1972. She kept the company and divorced her husband with three million deutschmarks and the house.
She did not mourn her loss. Unconventional as she was, she took on a stumbling lover, a generation younger and blacker than she was at the time, but professionally she carried on as before.
In 1979, she set up a network of sex shops in Germany and started selling pornographic films after the ban on pornography was lifted in 1975. A survey showed that 94% of Germans knew her name in 1984.
This was at a time when it no longer needed the slogan “Marital Hygiene” and could already address people with the phrase “More pleasure and more love”. In the new millennium, it has replaced it with the words “For greater sensual pleasure”.
Her sons didn’t mind, because her erotic empire had already become a family one. The children grew up with her work, so all three joined her in it, but later two of the sons merged and became her rivals, while one stayed with her.
When she died 15 years ago, she had only two children. She herself had successfully overcome stomach cancer, which she contracted in 1983, and her first-born Klaus succumbed to it at the age of 41.
But life went on and she remained at the helm of the company until 2001, when she died in Switzerland aged 81. Was she there just for decoration? No. On the news of her death, the value of her company’s shares fell by more than seven per cent.
Beate Uhse was not only a German pioneer of pornography and the first lady of the German erotic industry. In the 1990s, she was the first to use the World Wide Web to make money from pornography. In 1999, she was the first in Europe to take an erotic products company public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. She was an entrepreneur who launched her own erotic TV channel and a woman who fulfilled a lifelong dream by setting up her own erotic museum.
All thanks to contraception.
