Warnings from the front matter of "The Lady's Own Book."
In 1877, in England, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, who would become notorious for refusing to take a religious oath to take his seat in Parliament in 1880, were prosecuted for publishing and distributing a book on birth control.
In 1847, in Michigan, Dr. Z.J. Brown published The Lady’s Own Book, or, Female Safeguard; the title goes on to specify that Dr. Brown intends talking about “Generation, Sterility, Impotency, Female Complaints, the Diseases of Infants and Children…” as well as a host of other topics all covered “…in a plain, yet chaste, style…”
One wonders whether Dr. Brown hoped to escape prosecution in the United States by simply baffling would-be moralizers about his topic!
However, anyone flipping through the opening chapters of Dr. Brown’s book could not fail to get the point for long: “Until men and women are absolved from the fear of becoming parents, except when they themselves desire it, they ever will form mercenary and demoralising connexions [sic], and seek in dissipation the happiness they might have found in married life.” (19)
With the current debates on birth control availability, to say nothing of the case before the American Supreme Court on health care legislation, Dr. Brown’s text has fresh topical interest.
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