Conclusions
In spite of these efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to initiate ongoing research on contraception, the subject of birth control remained a problem of concern primarily to the social activist rather than to the research scientist or practicing physician.80 In the 1930s, as has been shown, American scientists turned to the study of other aspects of reproductive physiology, while American physicians, anxious to eliminate the moral and medical dangers of contraception, only reluctantly accepted birth control as falling within their professional domain.
As a result, the problem of cheap, effective, and safe contraception was not solved by these earliest attempts. Consideration of the subject was initiated afresh by private philanthropy after World War II, sparked by a new wave of interest in population studies.81 Summarizing such efforts to support research in the reproductive sciences, a recent Ford Foundation study has noted: “To initiate and sustain serious research in the reproductive sciences has required for more than half a century concerted effort by interested individuals and private organizations, mainly from outside the mainstreams of the biomedical research community.”82
The early laboratory research on chemical contraception described in this paper was but one important outcome of the concerted effort made by reformers in the 1920s to eliminate a variety of social problems thought to derive from excessive fertility. Scientific arguments and expertise were employed to advocate reform as well as to define the appropriate solution to such social problems. Scientists were recruited as advocates for the movement, but they were also employed as researchers in laboratory investigations sponsored by these same reformers.
Sponsors of these early laboratory studies noted the difficulty of obtaining first-class investigators.83 The routine analyses necessary for such research, as well as the traditional scientific aversion to applied problems, provide only a partial explanation for this response. The real difficulty lay in recruiting investigators to a field (reproduction and human sexuality) that had previously been taboo. Once opened up — first as socially relevant, and finally as scientifically sound — there was much interest in this area, and the appeal to researchers of the scientific issues surrounding fertility and reproduction soon surpassed that of the reforming value of birth control.
A survey of the kinds of experimental investigations sponsored by birth control advocates indicates the range of physiological problems explored by contraceptive research. The most definitive work was done on the efficacy and safety of spermicides, but the potential of other contraceptive methods was also examined. Investigators attempted to develop spermatoxins that would effectively immunize women against sperm, and they also tried to elucidate the mechanism of hormonal control of reproduction. In fact, speculations about the possible hormonal manipulation of fertility were expressed at the Seventh International Birth Control Conference held in Zurich in 1930.84
In the 1920s, clinical studies were undertaken to assess the effectiveness of the various birth control methods. Laboratory investigators complemented this work by screening spermicides for safety and testing for their ability to kill sperm. There were a variety of birth control preparations on the market (most of which were sold as feminine hygiene products), but no one really knew whether these were effective or even safe.85 Although the physiology of other major organ systems was well advanced, the scientific study of reproductive physiology and contraceptive technology was clearly in its infancy in this period. Routine analyses simply could not be conducted, because the fundamental research establishing baselines had not yet been done. Scientists used this fact to redirect attention to basic research on reproduction.
Laboratory research on contraception indicated important unexplored areas for physiological investigation. Social activists, who had encouraged prominent scientists to become interested in both the social value and the genetic implications of birth control, found these investigators revising the goals of their research. The biologists had formed their own network and had begun to seek out funding, reformulating the justification for sponsorship of further investigations. The eugenic motivations underlying these studies, which had initially made them theoretically attractive to biologists, were gradually eroded. Concern with “human evolution” ceded its place to interest in physiological mechanisms. Crew and others began to note that the use of biological theory to justify essentially political decisions had serious limitations. Biologists had become uncomfortable with those very arguments which had originally captured their interest. Recognition of the potential political abuse wrought by applying scientific principles to society was expressed by Crew just one year after the Zurich meeting. Referring to previous assessments of the role of sex in reproduction, he generalized: “In the past the biologist has justified feudalism, Manchester Liberalism, socialism and every other type of social organization and political programme by reference to selected biological phenomena.”86 By 1932 Crew had also begun to question the biological logic of regulated breeding, and had made it clear to his American sponsor that there was no simple correspondence between the practice of birth control and the genetic improvement of the human race.87
Biologists further began to recognize, however, that although the hopeful genetic solution to human problems was probably an illusion, contraception still remained one tangible means to alleviate, human misery. Some laboratory scientists, like Crew, acknowledged the applicability of their own particular skills to this problem. For a few brief years, social needs and scientific goals were mutually supportive and closely intertwined. But as laboratory researchers gained interest in the study of reproduction and established their own priorities in this field, they temporarily withdrew from the arena of debate over birth control as an important mechanism for social reform.
With the rise of Hitler, the genetic arguments for birth control rapidly lost their appeal. But by that time the scientific problem of how to achieve effective contraception had entered the professional consciousness. Both physicians and scientists began to be aware of birth control as a subject within their domain of expertise, although outside the principal focus of their research. Scientific discussion of birth control permanently altered from a question of justification to a problem of method: How could one achieve reliable and safe contraception? This had been Sanger's and Dickinson's goal from the beginning. Laboratory scientists had indeed been persuaded to undertake this work; this research had in turn affected biologists' perceptions of the whole field of reproductive physiology, encouraging further study of reproductive mechanisms. The promise of new knowledge provided for continued funding of this research, despite the caution by scientists that the social benefits would not be as immediate or as far-reaching as advocates and they themselves had first argued.
The activities of birth control activists and their supporting agencies, and the financial backing of private contributors and foundations, notably the Rockefeller philanthropies, provided an important new stimulus to the development of research on the biology of reproduction in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Biologists were able to claim an enlarged realm of issues for scientific study through their activities as advocates and as investigators for the birth control movement. At the same time, they promised as-yet-undiscovered possibilities for regulating human reproduction once its physiology was understood. The knowledge and control that they promised lay in understanding the whole reproductive cycle — not merely in evaluating the toxic effects of presumptive spermicides.
Chemical spermicides never summoned the interest of scientists as the contraceptive pill was to do, yet that research did reinforce the widespread perceptions of scientific research as essential to social reform. Spermicide investigations focused research efforts in reproductive biology by challenging traditional taboos, defining problems for further study, and providing laboratory investigators the opportunity to assert the social and scientific value of their own skills. Crew echoed this attitude as he observed in 1934:
Man has turned from the adventurous conquest of his environment to the conquest of himself. To-day is the day of biological invention, eagerly used for the control of the undesirable and the unwanted. Sex and reproduction are no longer hedged around by myth and taboo; they are no longer accepted as mysteries that defy understanding. They are matters inviting examination and explanation; they are regarded as expressions of physico-chemical forces, the nature of which is to be displayed. It is accepted that when knowledge is sufficient, control will be absolute, and, though knowledge is not yet sufficient, readers ... must be persuaded to the view that this will not always be so.88
The synergism between reproductive biology and social needs has been temporary and sporadic, but recurring, since the 1920s. Scientific research programs have clearly been influenced by issues raised by public debate. Nevertheless, reproductive biologists have continued to assert their own professional goals. For the most part, they have rejected problems without inherent scientific interest and have spurned applied research except as it has had a direct bearing on current research themes. This attitude, apparent among American and British investigators in the 1930s, created the intellectual context for the invention and acceptance of the technically sophisticated oral contraceptive pill. It did not foster the production and improvement of the simple, safe, effective, and cheap vaginal contraceptive desired by early birth control advocates.
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Bibliography
The introductory quotation is from Edward M. East, Mankind at the Crowsroads (New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons 1923; reprinted 1928), p. vi. East's role as one of several scientific advisers to the birth control movement is discussed below. Several recent historical studies discuss the transformation of birth control advocacy from a radical cause to a middle-class reform movement. These include: James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978), recently reprinted with a new preface by the author as The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Linda Gordon, Women's Body, Women's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1977); David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); Clive Wood and Beryl Suitters, The Fight for Acceptance: A History of Contraception (Aylesbury, England: Medical and Technical Publishing Co. Ltd., 1970); and Richard Allen Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
I discussed the reluctance of scientists to consider these problems in my working paper “Organotherapy and the Emergence of Reproductive Endocrinology,” presented at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Workshop, “Historical Perspectives on the Scientific Study of Fertility in the United States,” Boston, December 1977, and May 1978. I have restated this theme in a considerably modified version of that paper, “Organotherapy and the Emergence of Reproductive Endocrinology,” J. Hist. Biol., 18 (1985), 1–30. For the context of this reluctance, see also Merriley Borell: “Setting the Standards for a New Science: Edward Schäfer and Endocrinology,” Med. Hist., 22 (1978), 282–290, and “Origins of the Hormone Concept: Internal Secretions and Physiological Research, 1889–1905,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976. An important new source in this field is Adele E. Clarke, “Emergence of the Reproductive Research Enterprise: A Sociology of Biological, Medical, and Agricultural Science in the United States, 1910–1940,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Francisco, 1985.
Sanger's change in social emphasis has been evaluated from several different perspectives by Kennedy, Gordon, and Reed. For divergent historical interpretations of the significance of this transformation, see papers by Gordon Reed, and Elizabeth Fee, in The Margaret Sanger Centennial Conference, November 13–14, 1979, ed. Dorothy Green and Mary-Elizabeth Murdoch (Northhampton, Mass.: The Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College 1982), as well as Reed's new preface to the reprint of his book. Sanger's sustained efforts to recruit scientific support date from the planning of the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference held in New York in 1925. She then helped organize the World Population Conference in Geneva in 1927 and the Seventh International Birth Control Conference held in Zurich in 1930. The impact of these efforts in generating support for laboratory research on birth control is discussed below.
See especially Londa Gordon, “The Politics of Birth Control, 1920–1940: The Impact of Protessionals,” reprinted in John Ehrenreich, ed., The Cultural Crisis of Modern Medicine (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 144–184. The present paper extends and complements the analyses of Gordon and other historians by focusing on the specific goals and contributions of the biologists recruited by Sanger and her associates in the birth control movement.
The social context that encouraged the scientific study of sexuality and/or birth control is described in Sophie D. Aberle and George W. Corner, Twentyfive Years of Sex Research, History of the National Research Council Committee for Research in the Problems of Sex: 1922–1947 (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953), pp. 1–8, and National Council of Public Morals, Medical Aspects of Contraception, being the Report of the Medical Committee appointed by the National Council of Public Morals in connection with investigations of the National Birth-rate Commission (London: Martin Hopkinson & Co. Ltd., 1927).
Eugenic arguments acquired a particular cogency in the 1920s, despite claims by some scientists that eugenics was not scientific. This appeal can be explained by the hopeful claims made for social engineering and the widespread problems. For a history of eugenic ideas, see Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), and Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). The role of biological scientists in justifying such attempts at social reform is discussed in Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy 1900–1941 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), and Gary Werskey, The Visible College: The Collective Biography of British Scientific Socialists of the 1930s (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979). For pre-World War I origins of the attitudes described, see Pauline Mazumdar, “The Eugenists and the Residuum: The Problem of the Urban Poor,” Bull. Hist. Med., 54 (1980), 204–215. Garland Allen has discussed the changing relationship between popular attitudes and scientific interest in eugenics in two papers: “Genetics as a social weapon,” in Rita Arditti, Pat Brennan, and Steve Cavrak, eds., Science and Liberation (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 48–62; and “The Work of Raymond Pearl: From Eugenics to Population Control,” Sci. for the People, 12 (1980), 22–28. He has emphasized how the ideological bases of eugenics have been obscured by its association with science.
For a history of neo-Malthusianism, see Gordon, Women's Body, chap. 4; Wood and Suitters, Fight for Acceptance, chaps. 7–8; and Soloway, Birth Control, chap. 3.
Margaret Sanger, “A Program of Contraceptive Research,” typescript, 5 June 1928, p. 10, Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. I am grateful to Anne Harper for locating this document during our joint study in the summer of 1981 of “The Politics of Scientific Research on Contraception.”
See especially Werskey, Visible College, and Allen, “Raymond Pearl.” The social optimism and presumed rationality of eugenics as presented in the 1920s has been neglected in analyses by most recent historians. It nonetheless existed and was an important factor in the developments described in this paper. This optimism was especially apparent in the goals of the scientists who undertook contraceptive research. These investigators became convinced of both the social value and the biological significance of birth control research. The manifold political (and social) hazards of eugenics were realized only later. See below.
The Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, established in 1923, was funded by Sanger's English friend eugenist Clinton Chance and Sanger's husband, J. Noah Slee (cf. Kennedy, Birth Control, pp. 182–183). For a summary of its work, see James F. Cooper, Technique of Contraception: The Principles and Practices of Anti-Conceptional Methods (New York: Day-Nichols, 1930), pp. 161–204. Its advisers in this period included E. M. East, professor of biology at Harvard; C. C. Little, president of the University of Michigan; John Favill, psychiatrist in Chicago; Leon J. Cole, professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin; Adolph Meyer, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University; John Solley, Jr., physician in New York City; and Benjamin Tilton, also physician in New York City. Cooper was medical director of the bureau until January 1929. In 1940, the bureau was renamed the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau. A brief but informative history of its activities is found in Abraham Stone and Norman E. Himes, Planned Parenthood: A Practical Guide to Birth Control Methods, revised by Joseph J. Rovinsky (New York: Macmillan, 1965; Collier edition, 1970), pp. 29–31.
Conflicts between Sanger's medical and scientific advisers are discussed in Kennedy, Birth Control, chap. 7, esp. pp. 198–201. For an excellent summary of the medical response to the birth control movement, see James Reed, “Doctors, Birth Control, and Social Values,” in Morris J. Vogel and Charles E. Rosenberg, eds., The Therapeutic Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press, 1979), pp. 109–133. Physicians, as a group, were inclined to view birth control as hazardous to morality and to health; thus, moral and medical positions were very closely linked. For a review of the legal constraints under the Comstock Act (1873), see Stone and Himes, Planned Parenthood, chap. 3, as well as the discussion below.
Margaret Sanger, ed., The Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference, New York, March 25–31, 1925, Vol. I: International Aspects of Birth Control, Vol. II: Problems of Overpopulation, Vol. III: Medical and Eugenic Aspects of Birth Control, Vol. IV: Religious and Ethical Aspects of Birth Control (New York: American Birth Control League, 1925–26). Little, East, Pearl, and Cole served on the Program Committee of the conference with Adolf Meyer, a psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins, and W. F. Ogburn, a sociologist from Columbia University. Cole was unable to attend the actual conference. Little, East, and Pearl had already served together in 1923 on the Committee on Research of the Eugenics Committee of the U.S.A. That same year Little had served with Meyer and Dr. Dorothy Bocker of Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau on another such committee, the Committee on Eugenic Birth Control. I am very grateful to Adele Clarke for providing these details for me. They illustrate the very close ties that were developing between the eugenics and birth control movements through the participation of scientists both in this country and abroad. In a letter addressed to President Calvin Coolidge and appended to Volume I of the conference proceedings, Sanger urged “the formation of a Federal Birth Rate Commission”, suggesting “that this Commission be composed of impartial scientists drawn from the fields of economics, biology, sociology, genetics, medicine and philanthropy, and have free access to all facts and statistics as to all customs and conditions now menacing the racial health and economic well-being of our country.”
Quotation from a typescript entitled “Birth Control — Worldwide.” Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter referred to as MSP-LC). This typescript provides a historical summary of the international movement; the handwritten corrections to it may have been made by Edith How-Martyn (see below, n. 17). See also Press Release from Dr. C. C. Little, “World Scientists Plan Birth Control Meeting in Geneva,” February 11, 1926, MSP-LC.
“Notes of Conference Between Dr. C. C. Little, Margaret Sanger and C. F. Chance on International Population Conference, 1927, at Willow Lake, New York, 6/9/26,” typescript, MSP-LC. Little had by this time become president of the University of Michigan.
Copy of letter from Mohr to Huxley, March 12, 1927. This copy was enclosed in a letter from Mohr to Sanger, March 12, 1927, MSP-LC. Mohr also indicated that he was critical of the views of several British eugenists and reluctant to give them the platform in Geneva. For a summary of his position, see Nils Roll-Hansen, “Eugenics Before World War II: The Case of Norway,” Hist. Phil. Life Sci., 2 (1980), 269–298. I am grateful to Rachel Laudan for drawing my attention to this paper.
C. V. Drysdale, “Some Impressions of the First World Population Conference,” typescript, p. 9, MSP-LC.
Handwritten notes [handwriting matches that of Edith How-Martyn] entitled “Notes. M.S. 1. Visit to London. December 1926. 6–20th,” entry for December 4th, MSP-LC.
Ibid., entry for December 8th. Carr-Saunders had presented a lecture entitled “Migration in Relation to Social Problems.” He and Sanger talked for about an hour after the meeting. The quotation, like others from the diary, is a summary of the discussion and not a direct quote from Carr-Saunders.
Ibid., entry for December 6th. “Clinton suggested small round table mtg. of dozen or so Biologists to arrange for research to be done leading to simple, safe & healthy contraceptive.”
Ibid., entry for December 8th. “Planning sent letters for interviews to Crew, Parkes, Rolleston, Keynes, Haldane, Beveridge, Hu Shih, Dunlop, van Ness & Rieder.”
Ibid., entry for December 18th.
Edith How-Martyn to Carr-Saunders, December 21, 1926, MSP-LC. According to the diary entry for December 17th, Carr-Saunders initially agreed to act as Honourable Secretary to a Conference Council that was to include Prof. Bowley, Dr. Crew, Havelock Ellis, Prof. J. Huxley, Mr. J. M. Keynes, Sir W. Beveridge and Sir Humphry Rolleston. The composition of the committee later altered. See Margaret Sanger, Proceedings of the World Population Conference, held at the Salle Centrale, Geneva, August 29th to September 3rd, 1927 (London: Edward Arnold, 1927).
Drysdale, “Some Impression.” Sanger gave her impressions in her autobiographies: My Fight for Birth Control (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931), pp. 300–304, and Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: Dover Publications, 1971; reprint of 1938 edition by Norton), pp. 378–387.
On Pearl's career, see Sharon Kingsland, “Raymond Pearl: On the Frontier in the 1920's,” Hum. Biol., 56 (1984), 1–18.
The names of Sanger and her committee were not allowed on the program of the conference. In her 1938 autobiography, Sanger summarized the proceedings as follows: “During the course of the Conference the Americans, British, and Scandinavians admitted the need for limiting population; the Germans and Czechs concurred, although with less assurance; the Italian and Slav voices were definitely opposed; the French, who practice it at home, preached against it publicly. The papers of Professors East and Fairchild came perilously near mentioning the forbidden word Malthusianism, but as for birth control, it was edged about like a bomb which might explode any moment”. Margaret Sanger, Autobiography, p. 387.
Correspondence relating to this funding as well as a list of all donors to the conference may be found in MSP-LC.
This process of seeking out funding may be followed in the correspondence between Sanger and Chance dated December 20, 1927 through July 1, 1928, MSP-LC. The role of the Birth Control Investigation Committee is discussed below.
Cecil I. B. Voge, The Chemistry and Physics of Contraceptives, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933). Voge worked in Crew's laboratory.
Register, Bureau of Social Hygiene Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, North Tarrytown, N.Y. Items from this collection are hereafter cited as BSH-RAC. For a descrition of holdings, see “Archives and Manuscripts in the Rockefeller Archive Center” (North Tarrytown, N.Y.: Rockefeller Archive Center, 1982). The work of the bureau is briefly described in Raymond B. Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), pp. 137–140.
Raymond B. Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), p. 386. This quotation is taken from Fosdick's letter of June 13, 1924. In his summary of this subject, Fosdick refers to Rockefeller's moderate contributions to “the National Committee on Maternal Health, the American Birth Control League, the American Eugenics Society, the Planned Parenthood Federation and other organizations” relating to birth control.
The most complete account of Dickinson's role is found in Reed, From Private Vice. Reed's review article, “Doctors, Birth Control, and Social Values,” is also very useful for understanding the interactions of the leading figures in these events.
Dunham to Fosdick, December 14, 1927, BSH-RAC. Dunham was director between 1928 and 1934. He had formerly been associated with the Laura Spelman Rockfeller Memorial Fund. He replaced Dr. Katherine Bement Davis, who had previously been general secretary of the Bureau.
Fosdick to Dunham, December 22, 1927, BSH-RAC.
“Annual Report for the years 1928–30,” BSH-RAC. This document shows the increasing importance of birth control and sex research in the activities of the bureau. “Social hygiene and sex research” was one of six major sub-headings, which also included police, penology, juvenile delinquency, narcotic drug addiction, and special projects. Related correspondence suggests selectivity and occasional omissions in the report. This editing deserves further analysis in light of the extended debate over programmatic emphases during these years. One very intersting early document shows that a “Division of Sex Research” could have been one of two major divisions of the bureau. See Leonard V. Harrison, “Comment on proposals made by Miss Katherine Bement Davis for reorganization of the Bureau of Social Hygiene,” undated, BSH-RAC. This plan was apparently rejected.
Reed (From Private Vice, p. 376) has stressed that “development of the pill and of the IUD depended more on changes in social values than on technological opportunity.” This assertion is also true for the earliest phases of birth control research described in this paper. It is interesting to note that although changing social values demanded new solutions to social problems, in each case the assumption was made that the solution would come from science and technology.
Dickinson's interest in Crew derives from Sturges's trip to appear before the National Birth-rate Commission in London. Cf. RT [Ruth Topping], File Memorandum regarding “Dr. Gertrude Sturgess [sic],“ October 18, 1932, BSH-RAC; Robert Latou Dickinson to Dr. Katherine B. Davis, November 11, 1926, BSH-RAC; Sturges to Dickinson, October 20, 1926, BSH-RAC. Dickinson refers to his visit to Crew in his foreword to Cecil I. B. Voge, The Chemistry and Physics of Contraceptives, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), p. 11
“Cooperative Laboratory Researches — Report to Executive Committee,” November 23, 1928, BSH-RAC. These studies were conducted by (1) Dr. Donald Macomber in Boston, (2) Dr. George Papanicolau at Cornell, (3) Drs. Baily and Bagg at Memorial Hospital, New York, (4) Drs. Emerson and Flynn at Columbia University, (5) Prof. Guyer at the University of Wisconsin, (6) Dr. Max Mayer at Mount Sinai, (7) Drs. J. W. Harris and J. H. Brown at Johns Hopkins, and (8) Gerard Moench at Post Graduate Medical School and Hospital.
Taken from a historical summary written by RT [Ruth Topping], “Crew Spermaticide Study,” September 22, 1931, BSH-RAC. In this summary, Topping described the correspondence and lengthy negotiations behind the study.
“Research, Laboratory and Clinical, on Spermaticides — Memorandum for Project to be Undertaken by the Committee on Maternal Health,” December 5, 1927, and “Spermaticides”, memorandum to the Executive Committee, November 30, 1928, BSH-RAC. See n. 42 below.
Ibid. It was noted in this memorandum that F. H. A. Marshall was head of the Birth Control Investigation Committee, “the English group corresponding to the Committee on Maternal Health.” The actual chairman of the BCIC was Sir Humphry Rolleston. Dr. C. P. Blacker and the Hon. Mrs. Marjorie Farrar were its joint secretaries.
L. B. Dunham to Colonel Woods and Mr. Fosdick, memorandum: “Sex Committee — National Research Council — Hamilton Project,” March 12, 1928, BSH-RAC.
“Spermaticides,” memorandum to the Executive Committee, November 30, 1928, BSH-RAC. Note that this was a docket item, which was only considered at the meeting of March 26, 1929. Cf. Helen Geiger to Ruth Topping, “Crew Study of Spermaticides,” September 12, 1932, BSH-RAC.
Summaries of the legal status of birth control are found in Kennedy, Birth Control, pp. 218–271, and John Peel and Malcolm Potts, Textbook of Contraceptive Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 210–226, esp. pp. 212–214. Peel and Potts point out the lack of legal restrictions in England. This was a fundamental feature of the CMH decision to support contraceptive research in British laboratories. Summarizing the reasons for conducting the Crew Study abroad, Dickinson notes in his preface to Voge's book: “The governmental and medical authorities responsible for devising and maintaining standards of drugs and other therapeutic measures, when the Committee applied to them, declined to investigate any of the chemical preparations widely advertised or exploited as contraceptives. This variety of research was complicated in America by prohibitory legislation which in its desire to abate the nuisance of commercialized pornography, specified as obscene all information about and materials for the prevention of conception.”
Reed, “Doctors,” pp. 122–124.
Lancelot Hogben, “Francis Albert Eley Crew 1886–1973,” Biog. Mem. Roy. Soc., 20 (1974), 135–153. A very fine summary of Crew's work at Edinburgh has been prepared by Margaret Deacon of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh. In her typescript, “The Institute of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh — The First Twenty Years,” Deacon describes the development of Crew's research group. She includes in that document an analysis of the rise and fall of the sex physiology section. In 1930–31, that section alone employed nearly 20 people. I am grateful to Miss Hilary Prout for drawing my attention to Deacon's work.
Dunham to Woods and Fosdick, “Sex Committee — National Research Council — Hamilton Project,” March 12, 1928, BSH-RAC.
“Spermaticides,” memorandum to the Executive Committee, November 30, 1928, BSH-RAC.
Dickinson in Cecil I. B. Voge, The Chemistry and Physics of Contraceptives, (London:. Jonathan Cape, 1933), p.11
“Spermaticides,” memorandum to the Executive Committee, November 30, 1928, BSH-RAC. The CMH had originally asked Arthur Walton to do this study, but he declined. Later Dr. B. P. Wiesner was proposed as the candidate. Voge was finally approved after the grant for the study had been made. Walton and Wiesner both worked in Crew's sex physiology section. Crew's Department of Research in Animal Breeding was renamed the Institute of Animal Genetics in 1930.
Cecil I. B. Voge, The Chemistry and Physics of Contraceptives, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933). p. 21; for the list of the proprietary contraceptives and their manufacturers, see pp. 246–276.
“Spermaticides,” memorandum to the Executive Committee, November 30, 1928, BSH-RAC.
File memorandum by RT [Ruth Topping], “Crew Study and Interview with Dr. Crew,” September 12, 1932, BSH-RAC.
Cecil I. B. Voge, The Chemistry and Physics of Contraceptives, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933). pp. 171–175.
Robert Latou Dickinson and Louise Stevens Bryant, Control of Conception, An Illustrated Medical Manual (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1932), p. 37. The second edition, Control of Conception, A Clinical Medical Manual (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1938), was authored by Dickinson alone.
CMH [Committee on Maternal Health], “Researches”, March 1924, BSH-RAC. This summary refers to early attempts by the Committee on Maternal Health to coordinate research efforts with the National Research Council's Committee for Research in the Problems of Sex as well as with eugenists. This was the response of the CRPS: “A year ago we [the CMH] tried to get some of our borderline sex problems, like sterility and information bearing on sex life in our histories taken up by that Committee and received a written answer that their Committee was only interested in animal research. Several months later when sex life of human beings was included in their studies we again tried to delimit our respective fields and suggested the whole subject be a matter of conference and allotment. Their meeting considered the matter and decided they need not coordinate as the Committee on Maternal Health had only to do with birth control.”
Dickinson cited in Cecil I. B. Voge, The Chemistry and Physics of Contraceptives, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), pp 19–20.
File memorandum by RT [Ruth Topping], September 22, 1931, BSH-RAC.
File memorandum by RT [Ruth Topping], “Crew Study and Interview with Dr. Crew.” September 12, 1932, BSH-RAC. This memorandum was sent to Dickinson for comment. Cf. Topping to Dunham, “Crew Study,” October 6, 1932, BSH-RAC.
For a history of the work of the BCIC, see Peel and Potts, Textbook, pp. 11–13, and John Peel, “Contraception and the Medical Profession,” Pop. Stud., 18 (1964), 140–142. Peel points out that much of the work of the Birth Control Investigation Committee “had to be carried out on the periphery of established medical research.” Such studies included analysis of uterine action during coitus, production of sterility by spermatoxins, evaluation of the effectiveness of intrauterine pessaries, experiments on hormonal interference with ovulation and pregnancy, analysis of the periodicity of fertility, and determination of the effectiveness of chemical contraception. The most important study sponsored by this committee was John R. Baker's book, The Chemical Control of Contraception (London: Chapman & Hall, 1935). This work, discussed below, led to the development of the spermicidal contraceptive, Volpar. See also Wood and Suitters, Fight for Acceptance, pp. 169–170.
The typescript discussing the grant and presenting the resolution to the bureau is “The National Birth Control Association-London,” n.d., BSH-RAC. The grant was for the period January 1, 1932, through December 31, 1934. In 1931, the committee merged with the National Birth Control Association, and the grant was awarded in the name of that association. The official correspondence of the BCIC is now held in the archival collection of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. The BCIC was set up by the Eugenics Society, whose reports are also held at the Wellcome Institute. I thank Ms. Lesley Hall of the Institute's Contemporary Medical Archive Center and Dr. Renate Burgess for information on the location of these documents.
Baker, Chemical Control, and Peel and Potts, Textbook, pp. 11–13.
John R. Baker, R. M. Ranson, and J. Tynen, “A new chemical contraceptive,” Lancet, 15 October 1938, 235:882–885. See summary in Reed, From Private Vice, pp. 242–243, 417.
References to such substances appear throughout both Voge's and Baker's texts. Consider the following extract from one report made to the Bureau of Social Hygiene: “During 1930, Dr. Voge sent in twenty-six reports covering every phase of his investigation. He tested not only large numbers of commerical preparations extensively sold and used both in the United States and abroad, but investigated the spermicidal qualities of soaps, shaving creams, tooth pastes and a number of substance used in the average home.” From a report of August 27, 1931, cited in File Memorandum by Ruth Topping, “Crew Spermaticide Study,” September 22, 1931, BSH-RAC.
See especially Baker, The Chemical Control of Contraception (London: Chapman & Hall, 1935), pp. 90–91. Denis F. Hawkins and M. G. Elder, Human Fertility Control: Theory and Practice (London: Butterworths, 1979), p. 146, report that “the bactericidal agents are rarely used nowadays because of their systemic toxicity.”
For a discussion of Gamble's role in the development of tests for spermicides, see Doone and Greer Williams, Every Child a Wanted Child: Clarence James Gamble, M.D., and his Work in the Birth Control Movement (Boston: Francis H. Countway Library of Medicine, 1978), esp. pp. 106–107. Correspondence discussing the establishment of a Bureau of Standards is found in the BSH-RAC collection. See Topping to Dunham, “National Committee on Maternal Health — Establishing Reference Bureau on Standards for Contraceptive Instruments and Chemicals,” November 28, 1932, and EHG to LVH [Helen Geiger to Leonard V. Harrison], “Telephone conversation with Mr. Packard re application from the National Committee on Maternal Health for a grant of $5,000 to enable the Committee to secure the services of Dr. Voge in order that the Committee might prepare to serve as a Bureau of Standards for contraceptives,” May 25, 1934, BSH-RAC.
Vaginal contraceptives are now tested by the laboratories of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) Agreed Test for Total Spermicidal Power and approved for use as contraceptives by the United States Food and Drug Administration. See Aguiles J. Sobrero, “List of Contraceptive Products and Manufacturers,” in Mary Steichen Calderone, Manual of Family Planning and Contraceptive Practice, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1970), pp. 452–458. Peel and Potts (Textbook, pp. 37–38 and 264–266) comment on the main features of early tests and reproduce the IPPF Test for Total Spermicidal Power (1965). For a more detailed review of the evolution of the techniques of test, see N. R. Hardy and Clive Wood, “Vaginal Contraception,” in New Concepts in Contraception, ed. Malcolm Potts and Clive Wood (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1972), esp. pp. 108–113, and John P. Bennett, Chemical Contraception (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 9–13.
E. S. E. Hafez and T. N. Evans, Human Reproduction: Conception and Contraception (Hagerstown: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 286. New spermicidal agents have been introduced since the early 1960s, and the older spermicides have been reevaluated. In the late 1970s, the possible toxicity of Volpar became a subject of concern; it is no longer marketed in Great Britain. See John J. Sciarra, Gerald I. Zatuchni, and J. Joseph Speidel, Risks, Benefits and Controversies in Fertility Control (Hagerstown: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 557, and Hawkins and Elder, Human Fertility Control, p. 147. In the second edition of their book, Hafez and Evans (Human Reproduction: Conception and Contraception [Hagerstown: Harper and Row, 1980], pp. 772–773) give a list of ingredients now used in vaginal contraceptives. A similar list of British products may be found in Potts and Wood, New Concepts, p. 106.
Reed, in Birth Control Movement (p. 417 n. 12) reports that in 1938 Volpar was seized by the United States Customs when the Committee on Maternal Health tried to import it for experimental use. American advocates, thus confined by legal restrictions, focused on publicity - e.g., lists of both effective formulas and ineffective products — rather than the promotion of Volpar per se.
Raymond B. Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), p. 386.
File Memorandum of RT [Ruth Topping], “Crew Study and Interview with Dr. Crew,” September 12, 1932, BSH-RAC. At the Third International Congress of Eugenics held in New York earlier that year, Osborn had offered his own comments on the implied relationship between eugenics and contraception: “Directly bearing upon the purpose of the present Eugenics Congress is the claim that contraception is wholly eugenic. A considerable section of the public has thereby been persuaded that contraception and eugenics are identical and that it general birth control has a eugenic endorsement. The fact that the subject of birth control was not admitted to the two previous International Congresses [1912, 1921] on the ground that it had not yet met the full tests of scientific inquiry is sufficient answer to the most extravagant of these claims. The fact that birth control is being indirectly considered in the present Eugenics Congress embodies the admission that eugenics must now take their part in more or less worldwide inquiry and inductive testing of claims which thus far have been largely theoretical or hypothetical.” Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Birth Selection versus Birth Control,” in Third International Congress of Eugenics, A Decade of Progress in Eugenics (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1934), p. 36. Osborn had been president of the Second International Congress.
“National Research Council-Committee on Sex Research, An account of Rockefeller Foundation Resolution # 31066 and the subsequent Bureau of Social Hygiene resolution,” November 17, 1931, BSH-RAC.
“National Research Council-Committee for Research in Problems of Sex: Program and Estimated Budget for a Five-Year Period Beginning July 1st, 1928,” n.d., BSH-RAC.
Ibid. The central objective of the CRPS was “the promotion and coordination of research to the end that a better understanding of human sexuality may be obtained and that social, educational and medical needs may be met with an increasing body of fact” (ibid.).
The isolation of the estrogens, progesterone, the androgens, and the gonadotrophins occurred during this period. See A. S. Parkes, “The Rise of Reproductive Endocrinology, 1926–1940,” J. Endocrin., 34 (1966), xx-xxxii, and V. C. Medvei, A History of Endocrinology (Lancaster: MTP Press Ltd., 1982), pp. 385–435, 824–828, 844–846.
Topping to Dunham, “Research in Birth Control,” November 16, 1932, BSH-RAC. Topping refers to a conversation with Hartman in the summer of 1931; this was probably June 1931. Cf. Topping to Dunham, “Contraceptive Research,” October 15, 1931, BSH-RAC. Topping later noted the congruence of Hartman's and Crew's approach. See File Memorandum by RT [Ruth Topping], “Crew Study and Interview with Dr. Crew,” September 12, 1932, BSH-RAC.
Topping to Dunham, “Contraceptive Research,” October 15, 1931, BSH-RAC. Topping reported: “If such men as Allen, Doisy, and Moore for example, would keep contraceptive possibilities in mind in connection with their observations and experimentations, they would probably note stages at which reproductive functions might be interfered with safely and effectively. In Dr. Hartman's opinion this is a more logical approach to the problem than through independent experimental work.” Hartman later authored Time of Ovulation in Women: A Study on the Fertile Period in the Menstrual Cycle (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1936), one of the books in the Medical Aspects of Fertility Series issued by the National Committee on Maternal Health, Inc.
For a summary of the events leading up to the development of the contraceptive pill in the 1950s, see R. Christian Johnson, “Feminism, Philanthropy and Science in the Development of the Oral Contraceptive Pill,” Pharm. in Hist., 19 (1977), 63–78, and Reed, From Private Vice, pp. 311–366.
Reed, “Doctors,” esp. pp. 115–116 and 125–126.
“Regulation of Conception, brief outline of report of Committee of N.Y. Obstetrical Society,” RLD's [Robert Latou Dickinson's] version modified by Dr. Bailey, November 1923, BSH-RAC, and Dr. Harold C. Bailey, “Discussion of the answers to the questionnaire on the ‘Regulation of Conception,” n.d. [probably 1923 or 1924], BSH-RAC. See Reed, From Private Vice, pp. 168–171 and 407 for background to this survey.
Reed has noted: ”The major impetus for change in status of contraception came during the first half of the twentieth century from lay women rather than from within the medical profession, but they were aided by some allies among medical men, notably Robert Latou Dickinson.” “Doctors,” p. 115.
An excellent review of the financing of such research is provided in Roy O. Greep, Marjorie A. Koblinsky, and Frederick S. Jaffe, Reproduction and Human Welfare: A Challenge to Research (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1976), pp. 367–392. This retrospective of the reproductive sciences and contraceptive development was sponsored by the Ford Foundation.
Roy O. Greep, Marjorie A. Koblinsky, and Frederick S. Jaffe, Reproduction and Human Welfare: A Challenge to Research (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1976), p. 367.
Clinton Chance, reporting to Margaret Sanger on the activities of the BCIC, observed: “They ran against rather an interesting snag in the fact that they could not get any first class young men to take on research work which had Birth Control as its object.” Chance to Sanger, March 13, 1928, MSP-LC. The secretary of that committee, C. P. Blacker, explained at the Zurich meeting: “In England, these investigators are extremely reluctant to allow themselves to be drawn into controversial social questions such as birth control. They have a horror of the facile notoriety which can be gained by associating themselves with such movements and by pronouncing upon them. This is a very understandable reluctance, but it is one which it is in our interests to overcome.” See C. P. Blacker, “The Need for Research in Birth Control,” in Margaret Sanger and Hannah M. Stone, eds., The Practice of Contraception: An International Symposium and Survey, from the Proceedings of the Seventh International Birth Control Conference, Zurich, Switzerland, September 1930 (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1931), p. 163.
H. Taylor, “Report on the Hormonic Control of Fertility,” in Sanger and Stone, The Practice of Contraception, pp. 98–104. Taylor was very cautious: “The mechanisms which secure fertilization and reproduction in general are extremely delicate. It is certainly not very difficult to disturb them, but it is just as certainly very dangerous to do so. ... But whatever the possibilities of experimentation to this line are, we are very far from any practical application; and it is doubtful whether we shall ever wish to obtain a point where these dangerous weapons will be at the disposal of man.”
See, for example, H. M. Carleton and Howard Florey, “Birth Control Studies, 1. — On the Ingress of Semen into the Uterus during Coitus,” and “Birth Control Studies. 2. — Observations on the Effects of Common Contraceptives on the Vaginal and Uterine Mucosae,” J. Obst. Gyn. Brit. Emp., 38 (1931), 550–563.
F. A. E. Crew, “Sex,” in An Outline of Modern Knowledge, ed. William Rose (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1931), p. 257.
N. 70 above.
F. A. E. Crew, foreword to J. M. Robson, Recent Advances in Sex and Reproductive Physiology (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1934), p. v.
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Borell, M. Biologists and the promotion of birth control research, 1918–1938. J Hist Biol 20, 51–87 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00125258
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00125258