Inserting the Diaphragm In(to) Modern American Fiction: Mary McCarthy, Philip Roth, and the Literature of Contraception

Abstract

Get yourself a pessary .... A female contraceptive, a plug. Mary McCarthy, Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself, 34. Fiction, in both its elite literary and popular pulp forms, provides a barometer measuring shifting attitudes in twentieth-century American culture. Today, magazines aimed at young female readers are filled glossy color advertisements for various forms of contraception. Indeed, birth control is so ubiquitous that advertisers often focus on side effects, such as clearer skin, to persuade savvy consumers to select their product. And yet, until 1936, Comstock Act criminalized distribution of lewd and lascivious material through US postal system, including medical information on birth control, pornography, and fiction that touched on subject. The long struggle of Margaret Sanger and other advocates for legal and social acceptance of contraception can be charted through American fiction, adding dimension to legal and historical documents. This article examines Mary McCarthy's 1954 story Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself and Philip Roth's 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus to argue for effects of contraceptive technology on sexual and romantic relationships and shifting power dynamics between men and women.1 To fully understand these complex effects, we must situate birth control in its social context as it slowly shifted from an illicit and dirty knowledge to a scientific and medically legitimized prescription. Margaret Sanger, perhaps bestknown figure in fight for birth control, sought support of medical profession in order to legitimize contraception, which had long been considered immoral as well as illegal.2 Sanger advocated a Doctor's Only bill that would enable physicians to prescribe contraception at their discretion. Several doctors, including Hannah Stone, William J. Robinson, and Robert Latou Dickinson, supported Sanger and published articles in her monthly Birth Control Review. However, most physicians opposed contraception, and indeed the predominant position among prestigious doctors was not merely disapproval, but revulsion so hysterical that it prevented them from accepting facts (Gordon, Politics 258). These physicians saw contraception as tainted by unscientific approach of radical politics, and viewed their own position as protecting American social morality. Thus, while a minority of sympathetic doctors secretly provided contraception to private patients, medical profession as a whole did not publicly support birth control until 1937, when American Medical Association passed a qualified endorsement. This acceptance came with little enthusiasm, but rather objective of checking spread of useless and possibly injurious techniques and of ensuring their control by physicians rather than quacks (Speert 161). Cultural acceptance of birth control by medical profession and general public was slowly gained during twentieth century. McCarthy and Roth can be read as examples of rhetorical function of fiction in American birth control movement, educating and influencing readers, and as artifacts of cultural memory, reenacting history. Fiction played an important role in birth control movement, as I argue elsewhere, providing another ground to explore rhetoric of cause and revealing new insights into American culture.3 By focusing on increasingly public and dominant role of contraceptive technology in modern heterosexual romance, these texts relocate female as both subject and object of birth control, foregrounding and erasing woman as womb and sexual being. This article argues that their narratives represent in fiction feminist claims that reproductive technology simultaneously oppresses and frees women. As Adele Clarke has shown, modern reproductive science is grounded in an ideology of control: control over materials, over bodies, and over life itself. …