by Kate Lister
Condoms were big business in the eighteenth century, as both a contraceptive and a prophylactic. If you needed condoms in eighteenth-century London, you would most likely go to the Green Canister on Half Moon Street and ask either Mrs Phillips or her successor, Mrs Perkins, for one of their ‘fine machines’.17
The British exported their condoms around the world, and although the Brits referred to them as ‘French letters’, elsewhere they were known as ‘English raincoats’.18 The great lover Casanova (1725–1798) calls condoms ‘redingote anglaise’ (‘English riding coat’) or ‘vêtement anglais qui met l’âme en repos’ (‘English clothing that brings peace to the soul’).19 Although Casanova disliked using condoms, he understood their value and refused to use ‘articles’ of inferior quality: ‘I did not accept the one she offered as I thought it looked of a common make.’20 Sadly, this did not prevent him from contracting gonorrhoea four times, cancroids five times, as well as syphilis and herpes.21
A notice for Mary Perkins’s London condom shop. Francis Grose, Guide to Health, Beauty, Riches, and Honour, 1785.
Richard Carlile (1790–1843), an early activist for universal suffrage, wrote about common methods of contraception in Every Woman’s Book; or, What is Love? (1826). Carlile describes how many women insert ‘into her vagina a piece of sponge as large as can be pleasantly introduced, having previously attached a bobbin or bit of narrow riband to withdraw it, it will, in most cases, be found a preventative to conception…’ He also gives a detailed account of condom use:
To wear the skin, or what, in France, is called the baudruche, in England, commonly, the glove. These are sold in London at brothels, by waiters at taverns, and by some women and girls in the neighbourhood of places of public resort, such as Westminster Hall, etc.22
Animal-gut condoms were expensive, awkward to use and didn’t really work, so when Charles Goodyear (1800–1860) invented vulcanised rubber in 1839 it revolutionised the condom industry, and the first rubber condoms were produced in 1855. These condoms were designed to be reused and had to be made to measure, but they did protect against pregnancy and STIs – as well as against sensation of any kind.
In America, distribution of condoms was severely hampered by the enactment of the Comstock Laws of 1873. The act prohibited ‘any drug or medicine or any article whatever for the prevention of conception’ being sent through the post. In 1876, the Comstock Act was amended to read:
Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, writing, print or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion, and every article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use, and every written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the hereinbefore mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, and every letter upon the envelope of which, or postal card upon which, indecent, lewd, obscene, or lascivious delineations, epithets, terms, or language may be written or printed, are hereby declared to be non-mailable matter, and shall not be conveyed in the mails, nor delivered from any post-office, nor by any letter-carrier.23
The act was named for its most prominent proponent, Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), a deeply Christian man who had been shocked by the prevalence of the sex trade and contraceptives in New York. The Comstock Act did not stop people having sex, but it made having safe sex much more difficult. But America was not the only country that placed a ban on condoms. In Ireland, the 1889 Indecent Advertisements Act forbade advertising condoms, and remained in place until 1980, and Belgium banned the advertising of all contraceptives until 1973.24 Boots, the UK’s largest pharmacist, banned the selling of condoms in 1920 to prevent their staff experiencing any ‘awkwardness’. This policy was not reversed until 1960.25
Latex condoms were invented in the 1920s. These condoms were mass-produced and affordable, and mercifully they were for single use only. After epidemic levels of STIs among Allied troops in the First World War, latex condoms were standard issue for all recruits in the Second World War. The American military also began an aggressive ‘sexual hygiene’ campaign to try and keep their troops STI-free. The introduction of penicillin in the 1940s meant that infections such as syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia could be cured for the first time. However, STI rates remained extremely high during the Second World War, which suggests the troops were not wrapping up as ordered. But the condom and messages around safe sex were starting to become normalised.
‘Paragon’ reusable rubber condom, London, England, 1948–50. These condoms were designed to be washed out and reused.
With the introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1960 and antibiotics that could cure most STIs, condom use suffered.26 It was the discovery of AIDS in the 1980s that thrust condoms back into public view. Despite the reluctance of governments to talk about either safe sex or gay sex, the health crisis forced their hand, and condom use was at the heart of every safe-sex campaign, and has remained so to this day.27
This poster warned Second World War soldiers that even the perfect girl next door could not be trusted.
Condoms have never been cheaper, more comfortable, less stigmatised or more effective than they are today. If anyone should ever raise an objection about them to you, remind them of James Boswell stalking London with sheep guts tied onto his weeping penis, or condoms made from linen and ribbons, or the original vulcanised (reusable) condoms that were as thick as a welly boot. And if that doesn’t do it, remember the truly horrific, disfiguring diseases our ancestors would go to any lengths to avoid (other than not having sex, obviously). Thank your lucky stars and please, as Spike Milligan once said, use a condom on every conceivable occasion.
* * *
* A cave in France known as the Grotte des Combarrelles has paintings on the wall dating to 11000 BC that some archaeologists have claimed depict condom use, though this is very much open to interpretation. Louis Capitan and Henri Breuil, ‘Figures Préhistoriques De La Grotte Des Combarelles (Dordogne)’, Comptes-Rendus Des Séances De l’Année – Académie Des Inscriptions Et Belles-Lettres, 46.1 (1902), pp. 51–6
** The origins of syphilis are intensely disputed by historians, who argue about whether or not syphilis was first picked up in the Americas by Columbus’s fleet in 1493, or if it has been around much longer than that. It has been suggested that in the fifteenth century, syphilis mutated into the highly destructive infection that ravaged the world. Fernando Lucas de Melo and others, ‘Syphilis at the Crossroad of Phylogenetics and Paleopathology’, Plos Neglected Tropical Diseases, 4.1 (2010), e575
*** During an excavation at Dudley Castle in the 1980s, a privy was discovered that had been buried during the demolition of the castle’s defences in 1647. Contained within were the remains of ten animal gut condoms – the earliest physical evidence of such condoms in Europe. Fahd Khan and others, ‘The Story of the Condom’, Indian Journal of Urology, 29.1 (2013), p. 12
**** It’s often said it was named after a ‘Dr Condom’ or ‘Colonel Condom’, but there is no evidence of that at all. Oxford English Dictionary, Oed.com, 2018
1 ‘Campaign To Protect Young People From STIs by Using Condoms’, gov.uk, 2018
2 ‘New Data Reveals 420,000 Cases of STIs Diagnosed In 2017’, gov.uk, 2018
3 Nicola Low and others, ‘Molecular Diagnostics for Gonorrhoea: Implications for Antimicrobial Resistance and the Threat of Untreatable Gonorrhoea’, Plos Medicine,
11.2 (2014), e1001598 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001598; Kelsi M. Sandoz and Daniel D. Rockey, ‘Antibiotic Resistance in Chlamydiae’, Future Microbiology, 5.9 (2010), 1427–42
4 Jean-Jacques Amy and Michel Thiery, ‘The Condom: A Turbulent History’, The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care, 20.5 (2015), 387–402
5 Michael Leidig, ‘Condom from Cromwell’s Time Goes on Display in Austria’, BMJ, 333.7557 (2006), 10.3
6 Lesley Smith, ‘The History of Contraception’, in Contraception: A Casebook from Menarche to Menopause (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 18.
7 Lesley Smith, ‘The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus: Ancient Egyptian Medicine’, Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, 37.1 (2011), 54–5
8 Gabriele Falloppi, De Morbo Gallico (Padua, 1563), chapter 89.
9 Guy de Chauliac, La Grande Chirurgie (Paris: F. Alcan, 1890).
10 Quoted in Ralph Hermon Major, Classic Descriptions of Disease, 3rd edn (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1978), p. 26.
11 Robley Dunglison, A New Dictionary of Medical Science and Literature (Boston: C. Bowen, 1833), p. 223.
12 John Wilmot and others, ‘A Panegyric Upon Cundum’, in The Works of The Earls of Rochester, Roscomon and Dorset, the Dukes of Devonshire, Buckingham and Co. (London, 1667), p. 208.
13 James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. by Frederick Albert Pottle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 262.
14 Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, p. 272.
15 Daniel Turner, Syphillis. A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (London: J. Walthoe, R. Wilkin, J. and J. Bonwicke, and T. Ward, 1727), p. 74; M. Tampa and others, ‘Brief History of Syphilis’, Journal of Medicine and Life, 7.1 (2014), 4–10.
16 Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, p. 155.
17 Francis Grose, Guide to Health, Beauty, Riches, and Honour (London: S. Hooper, 1785), p. 13.
18 Robert Jütte, Contraception (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), p. 104.
19 Casanova, Giacomo, The Complete Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, trans. by Arthur Machen (SMK Books, 2014), Kindle edition, location 33819.
20 Ibid.
21 M. Tampa and others, ‘Brief History of Syphilis’
22 Richard Carlile, ‘Every Woman’s Book Or What Is Love?’, in What Is Love?: Richard Carlile’s Philosophy of Sex, ed. by M. L. Bush (London: Verso, 1998).
23 Quoted in Andrea Tone, Controlling Reproduction: An American History (Wilmington: SR Books, 1997), p. 141.
24 Amy and Thiery, ‘The Condom: A Turbulent History’, pp. 397–8.
25 Aine Collier, The Humble Little Condom (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007), p. 209.
26 A. Salem, ‘A Condom Sense Approach to AIDS Prevention: A Historical Perspective’, South Dakota Journal of Medicine, 45.10 (1992), pp. 294–6, p. 294.
27 Samuel Hallsor Booth, ‘A Comparison of the Early Responses to AIDS in the UK and the US’, Res Medica, 24.1 (2017), pp. 57–64
Bringing down the Flowers
Abortion in Eighteenth-Century Britain
But, th’aged Neurse calling her to her bowre,
had gathered Rew and Savine and the flower
of Camphora, and Calamint, and Dill.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene1
William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769) was a medical blockbuster. It sold over 80,000 copies, was translated into several European languages and was republished to receptive audiences well into the nineteenth century. Buchan claimed he wrote the work with an earnest desire to ‘assist the well-meant endeavours … in relieving distress; to eradicate dangerous and hurtful prejudices; to guard the ignorant and credulous against the frauds and impositions of quacks and imposters’.2 Domestic Medicine covers every subject from nosebleeds and ulcers to croup and water in the head. In his chapters on pregnancy, Buchan outlines the causes and dangers of miscarriage, and morally condemns those women who sought to deliberately terminate their pregnancy:*
Every mother who procures an abortion does it at the hazard of her life; yet there are not a few who run this risk merely to prevent the trouble of bearing and bringing up children. It is surely a most unnatural crime, and cannot, even in the most abandoned, be viewed without horror; but in the decent matron, it is still more unpardonable. Those wretches who daily advertise their assistance to women, in this business, deserve in any opinion, the most severe of all human punishments.3
Abortion was made illegal in Britain in 1803, when the passing of Lord Ellenborough’s Act made abortion after ‘the quickening’ (first movement of the foetus) punishable by death or transportation.4 Abortion before the quickening was not regarded as a criminal act as most theologians and physicians agreed this stage was when ensoulment of the child occurred. Until then, the woman was not regarded as carrying a child. But abortion post-quickening was regarded as deeply immoral. Dr John Astruc called the ‘miserable women’ seeking an abortion an ‘utter shame to human nature and religion’. Barrister Martin Madan called the women who died through botched abortions ‘doubly guilty of suicide and child murder’, and a spouse procuring pills to induce an abortion is cited as suitable grounds for divorce in a number of eighteenth-century divorce trials.5
As the previous chapter has shown, by the eighteenth century, rudimentary contraceptives were available, ranging from folklore and quackery to methods that would have offered limited protection. The withdrawal method is a time-honoured, if completely unreliable, option. Animal-gut condoms, which were rinsed out and reused, had been available from the sixteenth century. In his memoirs, Casanova records using a linen condom and a lemon slice as a cervical cap.6 Post-coital vaginal douching has been used as a method to wash away semen in the hopes of preventing pregnancy since ancient times.7 Owing to widespread disease, malnutrition and poor health, fertility rates would have been reduced, but unwanted pregnancies were still widespread. When a girl found herself with a ‘bellyful’ (1785), pressures of shame, circumstance, poverty and myriad other reasons could lead her to seek a termination.
A late nineteenth-century Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock print showing an admonition against abortion.
In eighteenth-century Britain it may not have been illegal, but abortion (post-quickening) was certainly considered a deeply shameful act, and the practice is shrouded in obscurity. Owing to the paucity of primary evidence, researching the history of abortion is notoriously difficult. Court records tell the stories of the women who died through botched abortions, and those who faced prosecution for attempting to induce one. Physicians and midwives were unwilling to risk their own necks by providing readers with instructions on how to perform an abortion, or what herbs and tonics should be taken to induce one. Rather, euphemistic language is employed in such texts to allude to a plant’s abortive properties.
Advertisement by Dr L. Monroe in the Boston Daily Times newspaper for ‘French periodical pills’ for regulation of ‘the monthly turns of females’ in 1845. Advertisement advises that ‘ladies married should not take them if they have reason to believe they are en ciente [sic], as they are sure to produce a miscarriage.’
A text may list plants that will induce miscarriage, embedding them within the warning ‘not to be taken by pregnant women’, just as ‘legal highs’ advertised themselves as ‘research chemicals’ and ‘not for human consumption’ to get around the law. Advertisements for ‘women’s monthly pills’ and ‘cures’ for ‘menstrual blockage’ can be read as coded contraceptives and abortifacients. In English Sexualities (1990), Tim Hitchcock argued that:
Throughout the early-modern period recipes for medicines to ‘bring down the flowers’, or to regulate menstruation, were a common component of any herbal or recipe book, and could certainly be obtain
ed from the local apothecary.8
Women seeking to ‘bring down the flowers’ (1598) would naturally progress from the least to the most dangerous methods of abortion. Certain known herbs were ingested, the most commonly known being savin, pennyroyal, rue and ergot. Savin, a species of juniper used to flavour gin (‘mother’s ruin’), is referenced in numerous court records regarding abortion once the practice was made illegal in 1803. In 1829, for example, Martha Barrett was accused of taking a ‘quantity of savin for the purpose of causing abortion’. In 1834, William Childs was charged with illegal abortion, having given Mary Jane Woolf ‘a large quantity of a certain drug, called savin … with intent thereby to cause and procure her miscarriage’.9 In 1855, William Longman was charged with ‘feloniously administering to Elizabeth Eldred Astins, 10 grains of a noxious thing called savin, with intent to pro cure miscarriage’. The list goes on. Abortifacients such as savin and pennyroyal are indeed toxic and consumed in a high enough quantity could induce miscarriage – at too high a dose, they could, and did, kill the mother too.
Savin Juniper Botanical Illustration, 1790.
If these methods proved ineffective (as would usually be the case), the mother was left with increasingly desperate and dangerous methods of abortion. Sitting in scalding hot baths, drinking vast quantities of gin, falling down stairs or being forcefully struck in the stomach have all been recorded as efforts to induce an abortion. But if all these failed, surgical intervention could be sought.10 Accounts of surgical abortion are extraordinarily rare in the eighteenth century. One of the few detailed accounts of eighteenth-century surgical abortion is the record of the trial of Eleanor Beare of Derby in 1732. Eleanor was indicted on three counts: one account of encouraging a man to murder his wife and two counts of ‘destroying the foetus in the womb’, by ‘putting an iron instrument’ into the body. One of the women Beare operated on was ‘unknown to the jury’, and the other is named as Grace Belfort.11 Grace Belfort worked briefly for Eleanor, during which time she was raped by a visitor to the house. Grace confessed to Eleanor that she feared she was with child and for thirty shillings (paid by the rapist) Eleanor said she could ‘clear’ her of the child. The account given of what happened next is so rare, it is worth sharing in full.
