Ms. Tone is also the author of The Business of Benevolence and the editor of Controlling Reproduction: An American History.
Q: Tell me about yourself, and how your interest in the history of contraceptives developed.
A: - I'm a historian at the Georgia Institute of Technology. When I was finishing my dissertation many years ago, I volunteered at a local women's reproductive health clinic. My training was in social and industrial history. Clinic work opened my eyes to women's everyday experiences with reproductive technology. The book grew out of a desire to merge my professional training with my political interests in the women's health movement, and to contribute to a literature that until now has largely downplayed the role of entrepreneurs and manufacturers as suppliers of contraceptives.
Q: What do you hope to achieve with your book, Devices and Desires?
A: - I want to tell the history of birth control in a new way while contributing to larger policy debates about contraceptive technology and availability. If my book encourages people to talk more openly about sexuality and the need for affordable, safe, and effective contraception I'll be happy. One thing readers will get from my book is my firm belief that laws and policies cannot "legislate away" the human desire for sex or pregnancy prevention. Obviously, this has repercussions for debates on abstinence-only approaches to sex. We have, today, an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past.
Q: Why was contraception historically looked upon as something illicit, as well as illegal?
A: - In the 1870s, when Congress criminalized the distribution of contraceptives across state lines, contraceptives were linked to a larger traffic in obscene articles that included erotica, trinkets, and pictures of naked women and children. Many moralists, doctors, and anti-vice crusaders denounced contraceptives (which are, after all, man-made technologies) as unnatural -- an offense against God and Mother Nature. Some openly worried that pregnancy was society's only "brake on lust" and that contraceptives gave individuals permission to act according to instinct without fear of biological impunity. Before we dismiss this view as old-fashioned, we should think about social responses to the availability of the Pill in 1960, which rehabilitated many of these arguments and directed them against women with sensationalist warnings about how the Pill would create female "promiscuity."
Q: What happened to women or men who were found practicing birth control?
A: - Not much, only Connecticut made it a crime for individuals to use birth control in the privacy of their homes. This prohibition was overturned in 1965, in the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Griswold v. Connecticut. In general, all of the birth control laws were poorly enforced.
