“Don’t Risk Disaster”: Early Advertisements for Contraceptives in American Periodicals

By Brynn Mattsen

Pull-quotes:

“With this pinhole focus on profit, contraceptive companies—or rather, companies that claimed to be selling contraceptives—put the health and well-being of their consumers at risk through actively misleading marketing.”

“As women became more desperate to find a solution to “their biggest worry,” as the Personal Drug Company calls it, they turned to advertisements found in the newspaper. Advertisements like this one “preyed on and compounded women’s fears of pregnancy to reap higher profits,” and thus benefited from the structural violence women feared in their daily domestic lives (Tone 157).”

Author Intro: This paper is an in-depth analysis on an advertisement for a contraceptive drug in a 1950 issue of The Afro-American from Goucher College’s Special Collections and Archives. I was caught by the vague and fear-mongering language used by the writer of the ad and was drawn into exploring the history of contraceptive drugs in the United States. Discrete marketing was a necessary staple of the contraceptive drug industry in its early days, but this permitted manufacturers to use misleading and manipulative language that preyed on the fear of unwanted pregnancies and put consumer health at risk. The paper unpacks the history of these drugs, their legal status in the US, and the structural violence implied in this advertisement, while also contextualizing the structural, social, and health issues historically posed by pregnancy.

Faculty nominator intro: n/a (student-submitted)

Read: “Don’t Risk Disaster”: Early Advertisements for Contraceptives in American Periodicals

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