When sociology and economics professor Norman E. Himes published The Medical History of Contraception in 1936, he had made a daring, yet tactical move. At the time, contraception was not, legally speaking, considered a medical matter at all. Under the Comstock Act, which had been in effect since 1873, all literature and devices used for contraceptive purposes were considered “obscenities”—illegal to possess or distribute. A doctor sending a woman home with a diaphragm or informational birth control pamphlet was not dispensing a prescription; he was committing a crime.
Himes, a strong proponent of legal, accessible contraception, was one man in an army fighting to strip birth control of its “obscene” label. He counted himself among a legion of white, middle-class feminists called the “birth control movement,” whose agenda was to secure the right to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Under the leadership of Margaret Sanger (a figure now known as much for her controversial ties to the American eugenics movement as for paving the way to accessible birth control), the movement adopted a singular stratagem to achieve its goal: to legalize birth control by medicalizing it. In other words, Sanger and her organizers sought to transform illegal contraceptive devices—specifically, the diaphragm and spermicidal jelly—into medical devices in the eyes of the law.
In order to medicalize what was largely understood as a social vice, the birth control movement attacked from multiple angles. Women organizers across the nation opened underground family planning clinics, and Sanger laid the groundwork for a pharmaceutical contraceptive supply chain. Meanwhile, Himes went to work behind the scenes cultivating an encyclopedic expertise of modern birth control, eventually resulting in the publication of Medical History. But Himes’ academic pursuits had an agenda: by writing the history of contraception as a “medical” one, he repositioned physicians as the natural and rightful authority on contraception, thereby legitimizing a previously salacious practice. A closer look at the oft-forgotten work of Himes reveals how a man with no medical training ironically became the foremost expert on medical birth control and helped achieve a medical model of birth control by writing it into existence.