Edward Bliss Foote designed an early form of barrier contraception that he called the "womb veil"
The womb veil was a 19th-century American form of barrier contraception consisting of an occlusive pessary, i.e. a device inserted into the vagina to block access of the sperm into the uterus. Made of rubber, it was a forerunner to the modern diaphragm and cervical cap.[1] The name was first used by Edward Bliss Foote in 1863 for the device he designed and marketed.[2] "Womb veil" became the most common 19th-century American term for similar devices,[3] and continued to be used into the early 20th century. Womb veils were among a "range of contraceptive technology of questionable efficacy" available to American women of the 19th century,[4] forms of which began to be advertised in the 1830s and 1840s.[5] They could be bought widely through mail-order catalogues; when induced abortion was criminalized during the 1870s, reliance on birth control increased.[6] Womb veils were touted as a discreet form of contraception, with one catalogue of erotic products from the 1860s promising that they could be "used by the female without danger of detection by the male."[7]
The use of rubber pessaries for contraception likely arose from the 19th-century practice of correcting a prolapsed uterus with such a device; the condition seems to have been far more frequently diagnosed than its incidence would warrant, and at times may have been a fiction for employing a pessary for birth control.[8] As with the production of condoms for men, the development of vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear helped make barrier contraceptives for women more reliable and inexpensive.[9] Other terms for the contraceptive diaphragm were "female preventatives", "female protectors", "Victoria's protectors", and the "French pessary" ("F.P.") or pessaire preventif.[10] This linguistic variety, some of it euphemistic, makes it difficult to distinguish in the literature among diaphragms, cervical caps, female condoms, and other pessaries; one form of "womb veil" is described in 1890 as "like a ring pessary covered by a membraneous envelope."[11] Another source in 1895 describes it as "a small soft rubber cup surrounded at the brim by a flexible rubber ring about an inch or inch and a quarter in diameter."[12]
^Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 216 online; Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (MacMillan, 2001), p. 14. An illustration of occlusive pessaries of the womb-veil type may be viewed in Vern L. Bullough, Encyclopedia of Birth Control (ABC-Clio, 2003), p. 206 online.
^Robert Jütte, Contraception: A History (Polity Press, 2008, originally published in German 2003), p. 154 online.
^Brodie, Contraception and Abortion, p. 212.
^Jeffrey D. Nichols, Prostitution, Polygamy and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847–1918 (University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 69 online.
^Brodie, Contraception and Abortion, pp. 190 and 212.
^Esther Katz, "The History of Birth Control in the United States," in History of Medicine (Routledge, 1988), vol. 4, pp. 89–90 online; Andrea Tone, Controlling Reproduction: An American History p. 215 online.
^Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 215–216 online.
^Angus McLaren, "Birth Control: The Diaphragm," in Eyewitness to Science (Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 175; Katz, "The History of Birth Control in the United States," p. 91.
^Patricia Aikens Murphy, Katherine Morgan, and Frances E. Likis, "Contraception," in Women's Gynecologic Health (Jones and Bartlett, 2006), p. 177 online; Larry Lankton, Beyond the Boundaries: Life and Landscape at the Lake Superior Copper Mines, 1840–1875 (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 160 online; Tone, Devices and Desires, p. 14.
^Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, p. 5.
^Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, p. 216.
^William Pawson Chunn, "The Prevention of Conception. Its Practicability and Justifiability," Hot Spring Medical Journal 4 (1895), p. 83.
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