Dr. Foote’s Health Monthly, September 1881
Amidst a lengthy back-and-forth with Comstock censors and the U.S. Postal Service, father-and-son publishing duo Dr. Edward Bliss Foote and Edward Bond Foote decided to move the publication of their Health Monthly up to Canada in late 1881 (Wood 34). The first issue of its short-lived Canadian run details their decision to move north; invoking our neighbor’s status as the “terminus” of the Underground Railroad in antebellum times, the Footes warn that “[it] looks very much as if in the struggle for free thought in the future the Liberal must be compelled to look to Canada as an asylum for personal safety.” For more on the Footes and their battle with Comstockery, check out Janice Wood’s “Prescription for a Periodical: Medicine, Sex, and Obscenity in the Nineteenth Century, As Told in Dr. Foote’s Health Monthly.”
Lysol Douche Ad, Cosmpolitan, November 1924
By the 1920s, savvy advertisers had begun using the phrase “feminine hygiene” to market “contraceptives that were not condoms” (Hall 78) to women. This Lysol ad lists a woman’s civic participation, competence as a wife and mother, and ability to function in the public sphere (in other words, qualities which could be undermined by an unplanned pregnancy) as reasons to stay “young” and healthy. For more on the advertisement of household cleaners as contraceptives, check out Kristin Hall’s “Selling Sexual Certainty,” or this feature in Smithsonian Magazine.
Zonite Douche Ad, Woman’s Home Companion, September 1924
This ad, for one of Lysol’s competitors (Ferranti 598), is noteworthy in that it touts the product’s relative gentleness while maintaining its “great germ-killing power.” In case a reader is hazy on what kind of “germs” Zonite is meant to kill, the ad’s assertion that “[no] modern household can afford to be without” this product should provide a clue. To quote Michelle Ferranti, “[t]he use of circumlocutions had been perfected by advertisers of douching syringes and solutions in the years after the passage of the Comstock laws; the advertising campaigns for douching products in the 1920s and 1930s were a continuation of this tradition” (598).
Covert Instructions 