The business of birth control (eBook)

This volume provides a significant new commercial perspective on contraception in modern Britain. It is the first book-length study to examine contraceptives as commodities and to demonstrate the significance of the contraceptive industry in shaping sexual knowledge alongside the medical profession, the birth control movement, and the state before the emergence of the contraceptive pill.

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The business of birth control is the first book-length study to examine contraceptives as commodities in Britain before the pill. Drawing on new archives and neglected promotional and commercial material, the book demonstrates how hundreds of companies transformed condoms and rubber and chemical pessaries into consumer goods that became widely available via discreet mail order catalogues, newspapers, birth control clinics, chemists’ shops and vending machines in an era when older and more reserved ways of thinking about sex jostled uncomfortably with modern and more open attitudes. The book outlines the impact of contraceptive commodification on consumers, but also demonstrates how closely the contraceptive industry was intertwined with the medical profession and the birth control movement, who sought authority in birth control knowledge at a time when sexual knowledge and who had access to it was contested.