2010/11/01 by L. A. Hall · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes #History of Science and Medicine
paper · doi:10.1093/shm/hkq060
openalex publication_date 2010/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Although there have been numerous books concerning the history of contraception, the vast majority of these deal with the rise of ideological arguments for birth control and the relationship between the increasing availability of artificial contraceptives and the decline in population in the countries of the west from the latter part of the nineteenth century. The story of the development of the Pill has received some attention, in particular in Lara Marks's important study Sexual Chemistry (2001), but on the whole, the material culture of pre-hormonal contraception has not moved on substantially from Norman Himes's pioneering Medical History of Contraception (1936). Technical developments are under-researched, as is the question of how marketing and distribution were managed in social climates which remained repressive well into the twentieth century. It is therefore with eager anticipation that the historian in this area greets a study focusing on the man who became the German eponym for condoms, Julius Fromm, whose Berlin rubber goods company was once internationally renowned in its somewhat specialist field, producing 50 million condoms annually in the early 1930s. Even in the 1960s ‘Fromms’ (plural ‘Frommse’) was an understood term for condoms, similar to the trade-name Durex in the UK. However, we learn in the authors' foreword that they faced substantial problems in fully reconstructing the activities of the company Fromms Act during its heyday in the years of the Weimar Republic. Julius Fromm was Jewish and his company had therefore been subjected to ‘Entjudung’ under the Nazis. His own papers and those of the company itself have not survived the vicissitudes of emigration and the ravages of war and its aftermath, although documentation survives in the German Federal Archives in connection with the expropriation of the company and later litigation for restitutions (not all of this, though, was available to researchers). Aly and Sontheimer did manage to contact surviving family members now resident in the USA and England. Their account, as they admit, has been compiled from ‘fragments’ rather than complete documentation.