Unwrapped: a US history of the condom

Paula Treichler is a professor at the Institute for Communications Research in Gender & Women’€™s Studies in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne.

PAULA TREICHLER: I got interested in the condom when they went from being this kind of, low rent, stop gap measure, that in the United States at least, has been associated with either the military, sex workers, or just sleazy, furtive assignations. So they’€™ve had a weird reputation, and then suddenly comes the HIV/AIDS epidemic and suddenly the condom is this global superstar. It shows up in the Olympics as the five rings, it shows up in Batman with just about every figure you can imagine, and it has been used in sculpture ‘€“ so for art, for advertising, for condom promotion, for really just about anything you can think of.

So I got very interested in that and I was asked to do a chapter for a book about it. And I thought I’€™d better not do anything until I get the history. I had a research assistant and I asked her to go to the library, bring me all the books on condoms. Now we have, at the University of Illinois, the third largest university library in world. She came back and said there aren’€™t any. I said, ‘€˜no, that can’€™t be right, these have been around for thousands of years, there’€™s got to be books on the history’€™. I said ‘€˜look under prophylactic, look under rubber, look under preventive, this that military training, VD, syphillis’€™. So she came back and said she couldn’€™t find any, but she did find a medical history of contraception, that has a long chapter on condoms.

So I began with that and one of the first things it says, is there is surprisingly little written on the history of condoms. And this chapter was quite good and got me very interested in not just the long history of condoms going back to Egypt, China etc, but really the modern history and the technological aspects of the condom – vulcanised rubber, then the arrival of latex and how all of those technological things furthered the industry. Still this book was written in 1936 and this must have been 1996 that I was taking a look.

Since then I have found articles on the history of condoms and encyclopaedia entries, and a few coffee table books that purport to be the history but are more a kind of recitation of mythologies, that they were named after a Dr Condom who provided Charles II with his condoms, which no one who’€™s ever tried to trace it systematically has found that person and yet, I’€™ve just picked up a book in South Africa on AIDS in Africa published this year and it said, ‘€œcondoms are named after Dr Condom’€, so that stuff just gets recycled.

I thought this is really interesting, so I began to research it. Now what I hoped is that there would be a whole pile of boxes somewhere. I had remembered Trojans from my girlhood, or my adolescence, and the Trojan condom, which is kind of a generic name like Kleenex or one of those products that just dominated the market so much, they were started by a guy named Merle Youngs, who founded Youngs Rubber Company in the second decade of the 20th century, and decided that what the US consumer needed was a reliable, safe, inexpensive condom. This guy was very conservative, devout Presbyterian, up-state New York farmer who then came to the big city, New York City, and began this business. And so it was in his family, it stayed Youngs Rubber from whenever he founded it, 1910, 1912 whenever it was, until about 1986 when it sold out to Carter Wallace of Carter’€™s Little Liver Pills and Carter Wallace I think now still is the global distributor and supplier of the Trojan condom which still is one of the leading brands in the world.

SUE: It’€™s a curious name.

PAULA TREICHLER: During that period, just about all of the condoms – US condoms anyway and British condoms – had names with kind of military connotations. And also, in the case of Trojan there’€™s the connotation of shield, protection, warrior, tough-to-get-passed, all those things. You also get Julius Schmidt, was the other leading company, and the two of them together came to dominate about 90 percent of the market by about 1930. So they did Ramses and Sheik ‘€“ so they had this Egyptian, desert romantic thing going on. But Merle Youngs was not into that at all. Whereas all of these tins and packaging (which by the way are quite collectable) and so the Ramses & Sheik pacakges were multi-coloured and quite detailed illustrations on the but the Trojan condom was very stark, usually a white tin with a blue or red or some other colour that specified what type it was ‘€“ whether it had a reservoir tip or whether it came lubricated. The only signifier of the Trojan was a tiny shield.

That’€™s sort of how they began. There’€™s a whole other technical history that involves unbelievable detail about rubber and naptha and how they got created. The early condoms in the US, which were developed by Goodyear and were talked about in his book, used vulcanised rubber. But they weren’€™t pleasant – they were thick and smelled bad and they had seams in them. And they were relatively expensive. Usually they ‘€“ and a lot of the condoms that came after for about fifty years – had to be treated in a variety of ways. Once they had gone through the vulcanising process they smelled of sulphur, which was kind of nasty, so they were dipped in kerosene or other substances to neutralise the smell of the sulphur, but then they smelled of kerosene. So then they were dipped in something else and finally in the end they would be perfumed. So you can imagine this horrible thing especially once it is in use, exuding these fumes.

SUE: And whatever effect it might have had on the woman ‘€“ or the man.

PAULA: Who knows what kind of toxic substances they were. And so, what you see on a lot of the tins starting about 1905, 1910, 1915, is claims about odour and purity of substance and not perfumed. So the whole time then the industry was developing, but for the United States, the thing that makes condoms so interesting, was that in 1873 this very, very conservative postal inspector, named Anthony Comstock, who was a big power in the New York City YMCA and friends with powerful people, and he kind of engineered it so that a federal statute was passed ‘€“ 1873 ‘€“ kind of in the dead of night, and all of a sudden, anything to do with birth control and a number of other things – abortion, masturbation etc. were illegal, including condoms. You could own them and you could purchase them under certain conditions. If you were of a certain age, if you were married ‘€“ it varied quite a bit state by state ‘€“ but what it really did was say that they couldn’€™t be sent through the mail, couldn’€™t be taken across state lines, couldn’€™t be imported, couldn’€™t be exported. And so the industry was very peculiar.

Schmidt & Youngs were both in New York City with warehouses and factories also in New Jersey. It was centered there and then distributed by distributors and salesmen in a very individualised way. But between the two of them, without national advertising, without open display, with this rather fragmented way of disseminating, because they were reliable, because they were relatively cheap, and because they were sold only through drugstores which made them respectable ‘€“ not really respectable ‘€“ but more respectable’€¦

SUE: And medicinal…

PAULA: Yes, it gave a kind of aura of health blessing. So the two of them began to be even more firm about the drugstore-only selling, and began to police the other condom makers. Someone tried to rip-off Youngs in 1928 by selling a Trojan condom that was very inferior. And so even though this product was quasi-legal, he took them to court. After two or three appeals all the way up to the east coast Appellate Court he was upheld and took up a series of wonderful ads in the Druggist trade journals claiming that the guy who tried to rip him off was a ‘€œpirate’€, and condoms should only be sold in the sunlight of the drugstore and not in the darkness and sinful areas of schoolyards and pool halls and buses and places like that

SUE: If the condom was at least considered as a means of disease prevention or health maintenance, why the secrecy? Purely because of a kind of puritanical edge?

PAULA: The puritanical edge was very prominent in all of this. The real difference was that under Comstock, the condom and other birth control kinds of things were prohibited, but disease prevention was not really a major concern of Comstock. And indeed then, when the widespread syphillis epidemic of the late 19th, early 20th century became more and more apparent, there came more and more pressure from public health officials to do something about it and the condom was clearly the most effective preventitive. Even so, there were huge battles over the puritanical thing, over all the same questions we encounter today – if you provide condoms will it make people engage more in illicit sex or unmarried sex, or other kinds of deviant sex. So it wasn’€™t until the US military and other armies ‘€“ the one I’€™m most familiar with is the US military – they tried abstinence and they tried washing and they tried other sorts of things, and finally they said, ‘€˜we gotta be frank, we gotta tell it like it is, we’€™ve got to show people how to put on a condom’€™. And the other means that they had was a chemical prophylaxis in what was called a ‘€œpro-kit’€. A guy in the armed forces could take this out with him, or as soon as he came back to the base, he could go to the doctor and get this rather gruelling chemical treatment that involved, I won’€™t go into it, but at the end he had to wrap his organ in wax paper and kind of let it bake or soak or something overnight. So it was not a real favourite, and it burned also and that was deliberate. It was also a way of saying ‘€˜you don’€™t want to be doing this very often, do you.’€™

E-mail: Sue Valentine

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