Womb veil
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The womb veil was a 19th-century American form of barrier contraception consisting of an occlusive pessary, i.e. a device inserted into the vagina to block access of the sperm into the uterus. Made of rubber, it was a forerunner to the modern diaphragm and cervical cap.[1] The name was first used by Edward Bliss Foote in 1863 for the device he designed and marketed.[2] "Womb veil" became the most common 19th-century American term for similar devices,[3] and continued to be used into the early 20th century. Womb veils were among a "range of contraceptive technology of questionable efficacy" available to American women of the 19th century,[4] forms of which began to be advertised in the 1830s and 1840s.[5] They could be bought widely through mail-order catalogues; when induced abortion was criminalized during the 1870s, reliance on birth control increased.[6] Womb veils were touted as a discreet form of contraception, with one catalogue of erotic products from the 1860s promising that they could be "used by the female without danger of detection by the male."[7]
The use of rubber pessaries for contraception likely arose from the 19th-century practice of correcting a prolapsed uterus with such a device; the condition seems to have been far more frequently diagnosed than its incidence would warrant, and at times may have been a fiction for employing a pessary for birth control.[8] As with the production of condoms for men, the development of vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear helped make barrier contraceptives for women more reliable and inexpensive.[9] Other terms for the contraceptive diaphragm were "female preventatives", "female protectors", "Victoria's protectors", and the "French pessary" ("F.P.") or pessaire preventif.[10] This linguistic variety, some of it euphemistic, makes it difficult to distinguish in the literature among diaphragms, cervical caps, female condoms, and other pessaries; one form of "womb veil" is described in 1890 as "like a ring pessary covered by a membraneous envelope."[11] Another source in 1895 describes it as "a small soft rubber cup surrounded at the brim by a flexible rubber ring about an inch or inch and a quarter in diameter."[12]