violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
I actually read this last December and wrote it up then, and then stuff happened, but I suspect many of you may enjoy a distraction.

Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada, edited by Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell.

'When Bad Men Conspire, Good Men Must Unite!' )

The Homeless, the Whore, the Drunkard, and the Disorderly )

No Double Standard? )

'It Was Only a Matter of Passion' )

Gender and Work in Lekwammen Families, 1843-1970 )

'To Take an Orphan' )

'A Fit and Proper Person' )

The Miner's Wife )

Sex Fiends or Swish Kids? )

'The Case of the Kissing Nurse' )

Defending Honour, Demanding Respect )
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
Books in Progress:

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch - nearly done, which is good because the library wants it back soon
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle C. Shane - in hard copy, because I seem to do well with a fun science book ongoing at home
The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite - read half of it, library took it back, and now my hold's come back in again and I have to get back into the world again...
Eleventh Hour by elin gregory - ...when all I want to do is keep reading this, but this oddly doesn't have a waiting list so I can keep it out for longer
Wizard Spawn by Nancy Asire and C. J. Cherryh - in hard copy, and Libby means that I'm not limited to just whatever I have in my purse, so this is going pretty slowly
And they were roommates... by [archiveofourown.org profile] harriet_vane - I know nothing about Cdramas, but there were cute lesbians, so
House of M by Brian Michael Bendis et al. - but really I should just admit I'm not going to finish this and give it back to the library
Foundations of Programming Using C by Evan Weaver

The Toronto Public Library does not seem to have a circulating copy of the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, which is frustrating. And surprising. I mean, I'm sure there's a Victorian translation available online, but ... Victorian translation.

Last year only 7% of the books/longfic I read were rereads, which is possibly the lowest ever, and that seems surprisingly likely to continue.
violsva: Finn and Rey hugging from Star Wars: The Force Awakens (finnrey hugs)
Okay, Christmas was good in the "too busy to actually post about it" kind of way. Mostly because I had Pixies for two weeks and <3<3<3. I technically had time for a yearly wrap-up post on the first, but I would have had to do it on my phone, so no. I got in Saturday night and spent most of yesterday knitting and catching up on Dreamwidth, because the next while is going to be busy.

I start class tomorrow. I was not actually intending to start college in January. I was intending to start in May, and then they were like "you can still sign up for January!" and I was like "...okay." (Not doing Yuletide this year was a very good idea. Oof.) So that's happening. In a month or so I will have a better idea of how this is going to work and whether I will have any writing time.

(Also, I am keeping an eye on my spelling but I am rather drunk at the moment, because warehouse shift today. So.)

The problem with thinking about writing at work is that if I figure out how to finish a chapter I don't want to have to count another box of brand name hoodies, I want to go home and finish the chapter. Oh well.

In the last couple weeks I finished This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which is spectacular and amazing and omg, the language, omg. And also Proper English by K. J. Charles (normally I can't get into her books, but this one worked, so maybe they just start slow for me. Or maybe I like lesbians better.) (also [personal profile] breathedout if you ever feel the need for a light romance/murder mystery, this one is set at a hilariously terrible house party and I feel you will appreciate that) and Hither Page by Cat Sebastian, who I usually mostly like and did here as well. I am all for this thing where queer romance authors are doing Agatha Christie, that is great and can keep going forever.

Who knows if I will have reading time in the near future, but I do have You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane, which looks good.

What else? I have a new piercing (because the one Pixies got me several years ago grew into the one next to it, so I needed to get it redone), yay new piercing!

Onwards!
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Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered, by Peter S. Wells

There wasn't much from this that I wanted to quote, until I got to about chapter 9, and then there was loads.

Measurements taken on skeletal remains in cemeteries in southern Germany indicate that the average height for men was about five feet eight inches, for women about five feet four inches, statures well above those of late medieval and early modern times. Measurements taken on skeletons in other regions are comparable. In Denmark, for example, the average height for men was about five feet nine inches--just above those for southwestern Germany--and for women about five feet four inches. These average heights were not achieved again until the twentieth century. Compared with earlier and later populations in the same regions, these average measurements show that most people had adequate nutrition during most of their lives and their living conditions were generally good. (p. 139-140)


A similar conclusion emerges from a grave in a small cemetery at Kunszentmárton, in Hungary, but here we see something more. This man was buried, around 610, with weapons and horse harness gear as well as tools and models for making metal ornaments. In this case, the ornaments were not fibulae but sheet metal relief objects that could be made of gold, silver, or bronze. These ornaments were for decorating horse harness equipment, belt attachments, or sword scabbards. The striking thing about them is that they represent styles that are associated with different regional traditions. If any one of these was found alone in the grave, the man would be linked to the stylistic tradition of the region in which that style was common. These models representing different regional traditions show that this craftsman could make ornaments suiting the fashions of several different groups of people. Apparently, he crafted objects according to the tastes of his customers rather than his own home tradition. (p. 147)


On an important carved stone found at Niederdollendorf, on the Rhine, one side bears a representation believed to be the earliest picture of Christ in the Rhineland (dating to the sixth century). On the other side is an image of a warrior, with sword and canteen, shown combing his hair. (p. 151)
Hair had various magic symbolism, but basically, gender norms are socially constructed.

Before the Industrial Revolution, moving goods by water was vastly cheaper than moving them overland. Estimates suggest that a given quantity of goods costs twenty-five times as much to send by land as by sea. (p. 157)


Unique manufactured objects demonstrate connections over great distances. The bronze Buddha figurine found at the manufacturing and commericial centre at Helgö, in central Sweden, was made during the sixth century in the Swat Valley, in north-western India, some six thousand miles from the spot where archaeologists found it in 1956. (p. 162)
European elites also used Indian garnet, ivory, and seashells.

The animal style [of ornamentation] that emerged in northern Europe has been understood as reflecting "different modes of representation" from those of early Christianity. The proliferation of the animal style at this time may have been in deliberate reaction to the representations that were being created in the late Roman world in the imperial provinces. Whereas Roman representation tended to be narrative--to tell stories--the animal style of ornament was instead symbolic and, it is important to add, difficult for outsiders to read. ... This line of argument would be consistent with the idea that many communities in Europe, especially those north of the old Roman frontier line at the Rhine and Danube, did not begin to seriously adopt the new religion until much later than some of the areas within the Roman lands, and many actively resisted to symbols of the new religion as well as the substance and practices. In resisting, they reached back into earlier times, even to the prehistoric Iron Age, to adapt and recreate iconography that would serve their purposes. (p. 175-176)
Humans: always basically the same.

Also: the practice of tossing coins into fountains (make a wish!) dates back to pre-Roman times in Europe.
violsva: Clint Barton and Kate Bishop shooting together, covered in bandages, from the end of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye (hawkeyes)
1. I have one more paragraph to write on this thing. It'll probably happen tomorrow.

I'm looking at the denouement here, and my brain is going "no, you can't stop here, there's all this work to do digging up the conspiracy and figuring out who was working for them!" Which A) would be a lot of writing, B) is not the kind of plot many people find interesting, and C) is contrary to my stated policy on this project. So I'm not writing it.

Unless the sequel shows up, which is isn't going to because I don't actually have the canon knowledge to write it anyway.


2. Putting the (NSFW) link here: This Is What It's Like to Have Sex With Hearing Loss


3. World map shirts! I have no idea what the quality or business is like, I just saw them and I really want one and I can't buy one right now so I am telling you about them instead.


4. Have two quotes from Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden, since I'm not sure if I will end up finishing it before it needs to go back.
Archaeological excavations of cities such as Taraz (in Kazakhstan) and Samarkand show that the designs on the products often catered to the stylistic preferences of the neighbouring nomads as well as the local urban population. For example, seals on gemstones from ancient Samarkand (the archaeological site Afrasiyab) have two different styles: one depicting a bull with wings, reflecting the mythological subject matter preferred by the townsmen, the other a goat in flight with an arrow in his neck, an example of the scenes of the hunt so dear to the nomads. (p 19)

The Uighurs, hitherto predominantly nomad pastoralists, began to settle, taking up urban and agricultural pursuits. Like their mentors, the Sogdians, they developed a rich commercial sulture as Silk Road traders and a complex spiritual life in which Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity were all represented. In the eastern steppe zone, they replaced the Sogdians as culture-bearers. ... The post-imperial Uighurs produced a rich literature, largely religious in content, for a population of which perhaps one-third was literate. The shift in the role of the Uighurs is reflected in a phrase from an early tenth-century Arab historian, Ibn al-Falqîh, who called them "the Arabs of the Turks." (p 47)

This book is made more difficult by the fact that the maps are all the precise opposite of the one in "The Hunting of the Snark."


5. Pride was two weeks ago and I am still finding random glitter.

Good things

Jun. 1st, 2019 01:27 pm
violsva: Clint Barton and Kate Bishop shooting together, covered in bandages, from the end of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye (hawkeyes)
We are going to a talk on local drag queen history at the library, and my hold on West Coast Avengers has come in!
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
So I don't usually do Reading Wednesday but this week I want to geek out about Runaways.

Also finished in the last week:

Road Through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move by Mary Soderstrom.
As a history of roads this was an interesting summary; however I hoped when I took it out of the library that it would be more of a history of immigration, which is really not what it was trying to do. And I still want that book, although it would be really really long.

Runaways: The Complete Collection, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan et al.

OMG this is amazing.

I have been reading Runaways since December--actually I picked up the first volume of Rainbow Rowell's new series first, which was great but also I am now spoiled for everything. So if that matters to you don't start there.

But the first series--it is actually making me really sad for my younger self that I didn't read it when it first came out because, um, that kid could have used it. But it is so great now. And it has Nico and I love Nico SO MUCH.

Nico Minoru is a sad bisexual Japanese* goth witch and she is trying so hard. And not exactly succeeding. And all I want is for her to be happy and she is really really bad at being happy. Like, even if her life was not exploding she would ... not be good at it. And I love her so much.

Here she is when her best friend comes back from space:
Karolina Dean, covered in rainbows, hugs and reassures Nico Minoru.

And then:
Nico finds out that Xavin and Karolina are still dating despite their planets blowing up.

Always great when your space girlfriend comes back from space and you missed her so much and you're so happy and ... then it turns out she also brought her actual girlfriend. Who is ... not you. Because you fucked it up. Right. Awkward. (Also, this panel contains three queer women, two of whom are women of colour (though technically Xavin in the centre is genderfluid). Just casually. Talking about plot.)

Vaughan paces things brilliantly--in among the supervillain fights are little quiet moments of characters talking about religion, or mourning ... everything, or going shopping, or having nightmares about turning into their parents. And I love the story structures and the antagonists, and in this volume he does something that authors very rarely do when talking about the internet (especially in 2006) and remembers that people use the internet to make friends.

I watched the first episode of the Hulu series over Christmas and it was pretty cool, but I'm bad at getting motivation to watch TV shows even when I actually have easy access to them, so I haven't seen the rest of it.

Currently Reading:

Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden.
This is pretty textbooky but I wanted a general introduction so that's a good start. Also when I showed it to Pixies the first time she read the title as "Central USA" and now I'm thinking about the Mongol conquest of the central United States.


*I noticed reading Silk** last year that I had been really feeling the lack of Asian characters without even noticing it. This isn't about representation for me--I'm not Asian--but maybe representation of my environment: I grew up in north Toronto and therefore contexts full of white people feel fundamentally wrong to me. In my head there should be lots of Asian people around, because that's just what the world is supposed to look like--my high school was probably about 75% Asian--and the contrast between that and most Western media, or the actual small midwestern city I am living in right now, is very weird.

**Incidentally, I'm still annoyed that after 4+ years on Tumblr I found out about Silk--and Runaways, for that matter--by randomly browsing at the library. If Tumblr isn't going to tell me about awesome Asian spider-girls then why was I even on Tumblr?
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According to Herodotus, the distance [from Sardis to Susa on Darius the Great's Royal Road] could be covered in less than fifteen days, when the system of post horses was used. The road was divided into sections that could be covered in a day by a man on horseback. At each station, a rider would hand off his dispatch to a fresh rider and horse: "No mortal thing travels faster than these Persian couriers," Herodotus writes. ...

The Persian relay system appears to have been faster than any other until the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan's couriers carried messages from his headquarters near the Yellow River in China to the western side of the Black Sea, a distance of more than 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles.) Khan's system was somewhat different from the Persian one: each of the great Mongol leader's riders was responsible for the message he carried, and so one courier travelled the whole distance, strapping himself to his mounts so he would not fall off. (At the same time on the other side of the world, it should be noted, the Incas who did not have fast, load-bearing animals, were using fleet human runners to carry messages, as well as perishable items like fish, hundreds of kilometres in the Andes and its foothills.)
-- Mary Soderstrom, Road Through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move
violsva: Mulan squinting at a bowl of food (morning Mulan)
Lots and lots of interesting case studies, not the best prose style.

From a letter to the editor of the Portland News, 1912: "This old story about more wages because she wears men's clothes is not the main part of the drama at all. There is many a good man who would marry such a woman as Nell Pickerell [aka Harry Allen], but she will not have it that way." (p 30) Would there actually be that many men happy to marry a woman who had served multiple prison sentences and given birth to an illegitimate child? I mean, maybe, there was a heavy gender imbalance in the American west.

"A quick search through this newspaper [the Idaho Statesman] reveals no fewer than forty stories related to cross-dressing appearing between 1890 and [1908]." (p 205 n33)

"Often western women sex-workers wore men's clothing as by custom it provided an indication to others of the wearer's occupation. Among such women were the nine prostitutes of the Williams Creek district of western Canada's Cariboo gold rush who, according to an 1862 news item, put on "great airs" when they would "dress in male attire and swagger through the saloons and mining camps with cigars or huge quids of tobacco in their mouths, cursing and swearing, and look like anything but the angels in petticoats heaven intended them to be."" (p 35) [emphasis mine] Note how class and gender are conflated here--the suggestion is not just that they should dress like women but that all women are naturally the innocent middle-class angel in the house.

M, an MTF case study in "Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex" by Bernard S. Talmey: "When "so dressed [as a woman], I can always think more logically, feel less encumbered, solve difficult problems in a manner next to impossible under any other conditions."" (p 61)

"By the turn of the twentieth century Americans had gained an international reputation for, as the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld put it, blaming "one or the other ethnic group for homosexuality."" (p 147) This is in the course of a discussion of how the Chinese Exclusion Act and various laws prohibiting interracial marriage prevented Chinese-American men from forming heterosexual families. (Canada was doing the exact same thing, incidentally.)

Chapter 5 spends a lot of time talking about "the apparent spread of prostitution, public indecency, and other transgressive sexual activities as the nineteenth century advanced" (p 168). Which, I assume, had a lot to do with the spread of literacy, urbanization, and the popular press, and makes an interesting comparison to how mass media, social media, and population growth now is making it look like the world is getting worse and worse, whatever your definition of "worse" is.

Also, wow, you don't realize how quickly Lamarckism was wrapped up into evolutionary theory to help out eugenics.
... In other words, we have reached the "fucking assholes" part of any history of sexuality. I may not have much to say about the rest of this book except swearing.

That said, "Viraginity and Effemination" should be the name of a queer bookstore. Or a zine.
violsva: The words "Oh, Sandy!"; a reference to The Comfortable Courtesan (Oh Sandy)
Volume 2 of Clorinda Cathcart's Circle, A Man of Independent Mind, about my favourite Utilitarian philosopher, is out today.

You can read an excerpt at the link, though it contains spoilers for Madame Clorinda's memoirs. The later chapters are a wonderful series of romance and mystery-solving.
violsva: The words "towsell-mowsell on a sopha"; a reference to The Comfortable Courtesan (towsell-mowsell)
This is a post I found in my tumblr drafts from last September.

Extremely fragmentary thoughts on Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668 - 1801

Donoghue mentions that the decrease of references to “female husband” cases in newspapers at the end of the 18th century is taken by some scholars as evidence that the practice died out. She doubts this very much, and indeed Alison Oram’s “Her Husband was a Woman!”, published about a decade after this book, focuses on similar cases reported in British newspapers in the early twentieth century, so I think it highly unlikely that there were no examples whatsoever in the century in between.

“On 14 December 1728 the Universal Spectator commented that every culture differentiated the sexes by dress for the sake of ‘decency’, and specifically ‘in order to prevent Multitudes of Irregularities, which otherwise would continually be occasion’d’.” (p. 90)

This seems to indicate a view that in the same clothes it would be impossible to differentiate the sexes - I am reminded of someone (but can’t remember who) pointing out that in Early Modern society the body was much less knowable than it is considered today, with even the poorest wearing at least two layers of clothes at all times, and shaping garments being normal, and clothes that hid or highlighted or enhanced certain features being usual for men as well as women.

“The radical sects formed in the seventeenth century, in particular, often allowed women to pull their friendships with each other to the centre of their lives. Quaker women such as Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers left husbands and children to travel and be imprisoned together.” (p. 151) (I don’t have anything to say here, just! Historic Quaker lesbians! Yay!)

“Nor is a study of erotica thankless work” (p. 183) – I’m just going to leave that sentence fragment there.
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The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrustation of magic at least once a week, because if you didn't, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn't have to be anything scary or unpleasant, like snakes or slime, especially in a cheerful household--magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself--but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory. And while the pansies--put dry in a vase--would probably last a day, looking like ordinary pansies, before they went greyish-dun and collapsed into magic dust, something like an ivory thimble would begin to smudge and crumble as soon as you picked it up.)

The best way to do it was to have a fairy as a member of your household, because she (it was usually a she) could lay a finger on the kettle just as it came to a boil (absentminded fairies could often be recognized by a pad of scar-tissue on the finger they favoured for kettle-cleaning) and murmur a few counter-magical words. There would be a tiny inaudible thock, like a seed-pod bursting, and the water would stay water for another week or (maybe) ten days.
--Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

I am posting this for two reasons: 1, it is one of my favourite book-beginnings ever, and 2, my mother got us a new electric kettle for Christmas and, unlike the old one, it is made of metal, and I apparently still have not gotten used to this.
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So [personal profile] james_davis_nicoll has a list of 100 SF/F Books You Should Consider Reading in 2019 which is now a meme.

Italic = read it. Underlined = not this, but something by the same author. Strikethrough = did not finish.

My total: 13/100

Read more... )
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The people who lived in House 16 [in Late Bronze Age Auvernier-Nord] must seem closest to modern archaeologists, however, for they were collectors and had 5 fossils and 2 polished stone axes from the by then remote Neolithic period.

-- Byrony and John Coles, People of the Wetlands: Bogs, Bodies and Lake-Dwellers
violsva: Geoffrey Tennant from Slings and Arrows, offering a skull (have a skull)
Vi: *looks up books about bog bodies*
Library Catalogue: Here is a book by an author with the same last name: Dark Money: Billionaires and the Rise of the Radical Right.
Vi: ...No, thanks, I'll stick to the Neolithic corpses, they're much less disturbing.

In 2017 I:

Jan. 1st, 2018 03:58 pm
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Wrote about 87 000 words (~25% of that in November)

Posted about half of those (and hit 200 posted works but not quite 300 000 words on AO3)

Participated in 10 different fandom challenges/exchanges/etc.

Read 72 books (including novel- and novella-length fanfics (~33%) and rereads (~25%), not including a whole bunch of shorter works and things I started but didn’t finish), and actually talked about some of them with people online

I am out doing family things today and for the rest of the week, so I may end up doing a recs post or something more when I’m back, or I may not.
violsva: The words "towsell-mowsell on a sopha"; a reference to The Comfortable Courtesan (towsell-mowsell)
I have been working on the assumption that everyone who follows me here already knows this, but of course that may not be true:

The first volume of those memoirs I have been fanning over for 2+ years is now available in forms suited to several e-readers and also as a pretty bound volume HERE.

It is amazing. It is the memoirs of a very selective English courtesan of the early 19th century, with lovely setpieces, tangled intrigues, a wide range of realistically complicated characters, and a beautiful and perfectly fitted narrative voice. It also contains Utilitarian philosophers, historically accurate diversity, polyamory, Sapphistry (and sodomy), useful precepts for novices, and a wombatt.

It has been making me consistently happy for almost three years now. I love it so much.
violsva: The words HATPIN TIME, over a pearl topped pin; a reference to The Comfortable Courtesan (hatpin)
(Part One) (Part Two)

Okay, the last few chapters have a lot of eugenics and also a lot of unethical medical and corporate behaviour in general, which I’m not talking about because they just make me want to stab people. (If you thought eugenics was over with after WWII, well. I’m so sorry.) The US was totally happy to fund international birth control as long as it was being sold as population control rather than women’s liberation.

A lot of population control proponents thought that the major problem with the Pill was that it was being taken by white suburban middle class women, instead of the women who “most needed” it - but they didn’t actually trust that poor uneducated women could follow the complicated procedure of taking one pill every day. In context with their support of IUDs it mostly looks like they objected to birth control methods which required women to take them voluntarily.

Anyway, her argument is that the Pill created a new idea of non-sick women seeing doctors and taking regular medications, and being viewed by the medical profession as patients, even though they were technically healthy. Which probably had effects well beyond birth control.

The Pill was approved in May 1960 and became the most popular form of birth control in America by 1965, used by over 6.5 million married women … and some number of unmarried women whom the official statistics ignored.

It was originally tested in Puerto Rico, because the scientists involved wanted to be away from the American press. Then the Puerto Rican press wrote articles accusing them of using poor people of colour as guinea pigs for a medication they wouldn’t test on white people, which was true.

And apparently in 2001 when she was writing the most popular form of birth control was female sterilization. Which, unlike the Pill, was usually covered by insurance, and meant you didn’t have to worry about losing your insurance later. ...I am trying to find a polite way of saying “Your country is a barbaric hellscape.”

She’s writing a history of the market, rather than really a social history. She does point out that most capitalist historians focus on the success stories rather than the millions of entrepreneurs who went out of business for whatever reason, and she in contrast gives cases on both sides.

I got less interested as the book got closer to the present, and I am dubious about some of Tone’s conclusions based on the information she herself provides. But in general excellent, glad I read it.
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
(Part One)

America was the only country in WWI which did not supply its soldiers with condoms. Instead they got education on moral hygiene and post-exposure chemical prophylaxis, which didn’t work (and was also extremely painful).

That said, about 5.6% of drafted men entering the Army had VD. Before the war this would have disqualified them; once they started drafting people and realized the disease rates that rule was quietly discarded. The propaganda, of course, still blamed licentious European prostitutes.

Soldiers were required to seek prophylaxis after exposure, so contracting VD was punishable by court martial. As a result, most of them just used condoms anyway. (They could get them from the rest of the Allies … who were buying from American manufacturers.)

The Bureau of Medicine and Surgery claimed until the 30s that chemical prophylaxis had a nearly 100% success rate - this and the inaccurate gynecological knowledge from earlier make you wonder what modern doctors are getting horribly terribly wrong.

What I’m getting from this book is that abstinence-only sex ed is a specifically American idea, and a very old one. I guess because everyone else exported their Puritans there. (Not saying that other countries don’t discourage nonmarital sex; just that they are willing to acknowledge it happens.)

Tone argues that the fact that WWI made people actually talk about VD led to greater acceptance of (male) sexuality, and in 1918 physician-prescribed birth control was legalized for the prevention of disease (and life-threatening pregnancies) only. This was in the trial of Margaret Sanger’s first clinic; she tried to argue that women had a right to have nonprocreative sex but this was ignored (there was also an earlyish example of eugenic thought).

Anyway, the immediate result was a whole bunch of condoms for sale (to men) everywhere, labelled “for the prevention of disease only,” which V. F. Calverton called “an intelligent adaptation to an unintelligent morality.” (108)

And eventually in the 1930s the army started distributing condoms to soldiers, having changed its sex ed philosophy from “Real Men are chaste and continent” to “Obviously Real Men cannot be expected to control their sex drives.” As of 1937, the FDA started quality testing them.

I found out why Dutch caps were called Dutch caps! Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs’s work promoting the made-in-Holland Mensinga diaphragm. I still don’t know why condoms were “French”, except of course that everything to do with sex was French.

Wow, you can just watch Margaret Sanger and other medical professionals (in this area mostly female) building up the authority of the mainstream medical profession. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, but it’s certainly a thing.

“Feminine hygiene” was a term coined by advertisers who still couldn’t legally say “birth control.” And it made up 85% of American contraception sales in 1938. Tone seems to assume that “feminine hygiene” always mean birth control in this period, and does show that the idea that it was needed comes from Victorian and later reframing of sperm as germs to get past the censors, but lots of people today use douches for “hygiene” and I don’t think that’s entirely an invented desire.

In the 1930s 70% of Americans supported medical birth control.

But birth control clinics were understaffed, concentrated in urban areas, and completely incapable of keeping up with the demand. And also lots of women were uncomfortable discussing it with doctors, but mail order was discreet and Lysol had lots of non-contraceptive uses. (Also, doctors were frequently untrained in contraception and unlikely to help unmarried women.)

That said, advertisers were totally happy to use spurious medical authority. Door-to-door saleswomen claimed to be nurses, and Lysol published a series of “Frank Talks with [Nonexistent] Eminent Female Physicians.” Again, respectable periodicals refused to publish advertisements for actual birth control, but “feminine hygiene” was okay, even if the ad copy was not at all subtle about its purpose.

And, this being the mid-20thc, the hypothetical tormented wives in the ads weren’t worried about economics, or careers, or their physical health. No, it was how will you appeal to your husband, once the “natural strains of marriage” take their toll on your appearance? And if you’re worried and irritable all the time, well, no wonder if he leaves you.

And since the manufacturers never actually said they were selling birth control, once it failed or caused horrible chemical burns you couldn’t sue them. At least, you couldn’t sue the huge companies, but regulators were happy to shut down small businesses.

Both the AMA and the FDA refused to condemn Lysol etc., even after the FDA started testing condoms. Pregnancy wasn’t a disease, so prevention of it wasn’t the FDA’s business. The AMA told women who asked them about birth control to talk to their family physicians, because they couldn’t discuss it through the mail.

“It is a common saying in the drug trade that the sale of condoms pays the store rent.” (Norman Himes, 1936, qtd. on pg. 190)

In 1882 Julius Schmidt was a homeless disabled German Jewish immigrant. In 1890 he was prosecuted by Anthony Comstock for selling condoms. In 1940 he was one of the largest condom manufacturers in the country and his products were endorsed by the US Army.

Youngs Rubber (Trojan) emphasized their reputability by saying they sold only to drugstores (as opposed to other condoms, which were offered by shoeshiners and bellhops and street peddlers) and tested all of their products. However, they had all this merchandise hanging around that had failed the tests … so they sold those to whoever wanted them as manufacturer’s seconds.

And a lot of customers didn’t bother paying extra for first quality manufacturer-tested condoms, and just tested them themselves at home.

All of these companies employed large numbers of women. The factory workers, and especially the saleswomen pretending to be nurses - and thus middle class - who were they? How did their jobs fit with the expectations that “nice” girls didn’t know anything about sex?
violsva: The words HATPIN TIME, over a pearl topped pin; a reference to The Comfortable Courtesan (hatpin)
Anthony Comstock was such a deeply unpleasant person that near the end of the first chapter I checked the index to see how much longer I’d have to put up with him. But it turns out that the next chapter was full of judges and prosecutors and other officials who also thought he was an asshole (and refused to convict or harshly punish people under his law), so that was nice.

Lots and lots of anti-abortion free love proponents. (And some anti-”unnatural” contraception ones, too, which. IDEK.)

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice included lots of prominent and wealthy citizens, some of whom happened to own contraceptive-selling businesses which for some strange reason never got raided or shut down. “Freethinkers dubbed the NYSSV the “Society for the Manufacture and Suppression of Vice” and boycotted [its President] Colgate’s products for years.” (29) Most of the people prosecuted for selling birth control were women, immigrants, and/or Jewish.

Today in Awesome Historical Women You Probably Haven’t Heard of, Sarah Chase.

Comstock was so well known that people sold birth control devices under the name “Comstock Syringes”, which meant they could avoid prosecution by not actually saying they were for birth control. A+.

At least from the 1860s, and probably before, a man in New York City who wanted birth control could walk into a pharmacy or a “rubber shop” and walk out with a package of condoms, even though after 1873 the US had the most restrictive contraception laws in the west. A woman who wanted birth control could get it by mail order anywhere in the country. (Though it was mostly only advertised in publications aimed at the working class.) This was almost certainly even more true in most of Europe (definitely in London).

However, condoms seem to have had about a 50% failure rate (note that that’s the % of pregnancies after one year of use, not the breakage rate). Douching was extremely popular and also basically useless. “Womb veils” (diaphragms and/or cervical caps) were probably more effective, but it’s hard to tell because so much depends on sizing and details. IUDs worked and were available but generally needed doctors to insert them and also were deeply unsafe.

I wonder how many women had major gynecological issues in this period and just ... dealt with them, lived through them, spent days in bed sometimes, did all the housework while in unspeakable pain because that was just their life and no one could do anything about it. (I mean, throughout history, but in this period specifically so much of “women’s medicine” seems to have been just making things worse.)

The 19th century understanding of ovulation was that it probably happened around menstruation, which means that lots of doctors recommended only having sex during what they thought was the “safe period” and lots of couples followed their advice and immediately got pregnant. (Timing of ovulation discovered in the 1920s; modern rhythm method described in 1930.)

On the other hand, “Doctors’ remonstrations against withdrawal, which linked it to insanity, impotence, blindness, and a host of other ailments, may have persuaded some men not to try it and others to “change their minds” at the last minute. Although modern science has invalidated such prophecies of doom, they may well have had a placebo effect on Americans in an earlier era. In 1895, one woman complained that her husband, a physician, had practiced withdrawal only to complain of being entirely “worn out [the] next day.”” (72) Men.

Evidence that some mothers told their daughters about birth control, at least in the pre-wedding Talk: I did not expect this.

1924 study found that 2/3 of respondents had used some form of birth control. Also mentions “one woman from a small Midwestern town whose determination [to gain information] led her to the doorsteps of the community member she believed possessed the most expertise: the “keeper of a brothel.”” (78)

May 2025

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