SEXIS WRONG

doms for personal use based on English models. It was not
until 1844 that one advice book, The United States Practical
Receipt Book; Or, Complete Book of Reference, gave a detailed
description of how to make a condom from the cecum
of a sheep. The description was probably based on a standard
recipe for homemade condoms mentioned above.
In the first part of the nineteenth century, condoms began to
be advertised in some newspapers and other printed material
as a preventative against syphilis, and the sellers said they
would ship them anywhere in the country. Packages of fish
bladder “membraneous envelopes” were sold at $5 a dozen
in New York City in 1860. This price would have prevented all
but the extremely well-to-do from using such condoms; instead,
most used the much cheaper animal ones and washed
them repeatedly.
The cost, availability, and material of condoms slowly changed
with the vulcanization of rubber by Charles Goodyear and
Thomas Hancock in 1843-44. The key development for condoms,
however, was the 1853 discovery of liquid latex, which
led to the development of thinner and finer condoms. The
first latex condom was really a cap designed to cover the
glans, not the entire penis. It was described as being made
of a “delicate texture” rubber no thicker than the cuticle and
shaped and bound at the open end with an India rubber ring.
The cap was soon extended to a sheath, and there is a description
of a full-length one in 1869 as being effective in
preventing conception even though it dulled sensation and
irritated the vagina.
These early rubber condoms were molded from sheet crepe
and carried a seam along their entire length. Making the latex
condoms more effective and useful depended upon further
development in rubber technology, and the major innovation
was the seamless cement process, so named because the
process was similar to that used in producing rubber cement.
Natural rubber was ground up, dissolved, then heated with a
solvent in which cylindrical glass molds were dipped. As the
solvent evaporated, the condom dried. They were then vulcanized
by being exposed to sulfur dioxide. These new types
of condom were on the market before 1889. The major difficulty
was that the finished product had a very short shelf life
and had to be used within a comparatively short time of its
manufacture. The advantage was that these new condoms
were fairly inexpensive and easily disposable. By the 1870s
wholesale druggists were selling rubber, skin, and imported
condoms at six to sixteen cents each, and in retail outlets or
from peddlers they were from $1 to $4 a dozen.
Condoms, as they became more available and trustworthy,
were increasingly being used as a means of family planning.
Still, only eight of the forty-five women who filled out a sex
questionnaire (designed by Clelia Mosher and used over a
thirty-year period up to 1920) reported that their husbands
had used condoms as part of a means of preventing pregnancy.
The ambiguity that some women felt about using condoms
was expressed in a letter in 1878 that an Idaho woman,
Mary Hallock Foote, wrote to a friend in New York to tell her
how she and her husband planned to use a condom to avoid
another pregnancy so soon after her current one. She reported
that she had learned about condoms from a friend, Mrs.
Hague, who told her to have her husband go to a physician
and get shields of some kind:
They are to be had also at some druggists. It sounds
perfectly revolting, but one must face anything
rather than the inevitable result of Nature’s
methods. At all events there is nothing injurious
about this. Mrs. Hague is a very fastidious woman
and I hardly think she would submit to anything
very bad... [Quoted by Brodie, 1994, p 206]
Availability, however, did not mean widespread usage, and
because condoms could not be sold for contraceptive use
in many parts of the United States because of state laws
copying the federal Comstock Act, they had to be sold as
prophylactics. In other countries, however, they were sold as
contraceptives as well, and distributed widely, even through
dispensing machines. Distribution in the United States was
primarily through drugstores and barbershops, but they were
also sold by traveling salesmen who visited industrial plants
and businesses employing large numbers of men.
By 1890 packages of condoms were available at fifty cents
a dozen. The main problem, however, with all contraceptive
material in the United States was lack of quality control. There
was neither patent nor copyright protection for the manufacturer.
None of the major rubber manufacturers, at least as
indicated by the archives at the University of Akron (now Kent
State University), manufactured them, and this meant that
the market was left to a number of smaller companies, some
of them with a very tenuous financial base. Eventually, several
companies emerged with adequate quality control, including
Young’s Rubber, Julius Schmid, and Akwell. The entrance of
Young’s Rubber, founded by Merle Young (a drugstore-products
salesman) in the mid-1920s, was particularly important
because of his emphasis on quality control. Young’s Rubber
also began a series of court suits that eventually overturned
many of the state laws against condom sales.
In the 1930s, new techniques were developed that enabled
rubber plantations to ship concentrated liquid natural rubber
latex directly to the manufacturer, and this eliminated
the need to grind and dissolve rubber back to a liquid state.
Though this proved to be a less costly method of manufac-
THE CONDOM 293