Women of Wednesday: Andrea Tone -- Devices and Desires

Robin Young featured Andrea Tone in yesterday's Here and Now broadcast on NPR. It's a fascinating look at the history of contraception.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking Here and Now.

This is a blurb from the Macmillan website:

From thriving black market to big business, the commercialization of birth control in the United States

In Devices and Desires, Andrea Tone breaks new ground by showing what it was really like to buy, produce, and use contraceptives during a century of profound social and technological change. A down-and-out sausage-casing worker by day who turned surplus animal intestines into a million-dollar condom enterprise at night; inventors who fashioned cervical caps out of watch springs; and a mother of six who kissed photographs of the inventor of the Pill -- these are just a few of the individuals who make up this riveting story.

Andrea Tone, an associate professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is the author of The Business of Benevolence and the editor of Controlling Reproduction: An American History. Her research on women’s health has been featured on ABC, PBS, National Public Radio, CTV, the CBC, the History Channel, and in Newsweek, Macleans, and the New York Times.  She lives in Decatur, Georgia.