When Women Used Lysol as Birth Control

A look back at shocking ads for the popular, dangerous, and ineffective antiseptic douche. —Nicole Pasulka

The current attack on access to birth control had us thinking back to the first half of the 20th century, when contraceptive methods taken for granted today, like condoms and diaphragms, were expensive, hard to find, and often required a potentially humiliating exam by a disapproving doctor.

Of course, women who couldn’t afford or gain access to medically administered birth control had to come up with their own strategies for staying baby free. Douching was cheap, accessible, and widely advertised as a feminine hygiene product; however, as Andrea Tone writes in the book Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, it was also the most common form of birth control from 1940 until 1960—when the oral contraceptive pill arrived on the market.

The most popular brand of douche was Lysol—an antiseptic soap whose pre-1953 formula contained cresol, a phenol compound reported in some cases to cause inflammation, burning, and even death. By 1911 doctors had recorded 193 Lysol poisonings and five deaths from uterine irrigation. Despite reports to the contrary, Lysol was aggressively marketed to women as safe and gentle. Once cresol was replaced with ortho-hydroxydiphenyl in the formula, Lysol was pushed as a germicide good for cleaning toilet bowls and treating ringworm, and Lehn & Fink's, the company that made the disinfectant, continued to market it as safeguard for women's "dainty feminine allure."

Douching may have been cheaper than condoms or diaphragms and available over the counter in most drugstores, but it didn’t work. In a 1933 study, Tone writes, nearly half of the 507 women who used douching as a birth control method ended up pregnant.

But if false advertising with highly suspect results weren't bad enough, the ads promoted a level of misogyny and female insecurity both laughable and frightening by today's standards. Images of wives locked out their homes or trapped by cobwebs are surrounded by text asserting a woman should "question herself" if her husband's interest seemed to have faded. If her husband is treating her badly, the message was, "she was really the one to blame."

These ads and the product they're hawking are a chilling reminder of a time when most women had limited access to birth control or reliable medical knowledge about contraception. Corporate muscle moved into the void to advertise Lysol as contraception under the widely recognized euphemism of “feminine hygiene,” and as Tone writes, “the strategy won sales by jeopardizing women’s health."

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Kandee Riggio 03/08/2012 05:36 AM

I just keep thinking how bad Lysol smells------------------
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Glory Mooncalled and 11 more liked this

Jayelle 03/08/2012 06:33 AM in reply to Kandee Riggio

And tastes, and feels when you splash some on your hands while you're cleaning....
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4 people liked this.

Jayelle 03/08/2012 06:34 AM

Making women feel insecure in order to sell them a dangerous product seems, at best, awfully....douchey.
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Heather McCrillis and 64 more liked this

Kate DeBraose 03/17/2012 03:29 PM in reply to Jayelle

You got that right. People who sell things always feel superior to females, no matter if they are sleazy criminals in real life, or as pure as the driven snow.
And that, dear children has been taught to us all by the wannabe Masters of Nazi loving social lords of every country on earth. Well, what better way to divide and conquer a powerful nation like the USA? Aren't females more than half of the population?
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Em Hooper and 4 more liked this

APPCNC 03/08/2012 07:13 AM

My org provides a sexual health info service to teens. Teen still do this. I've never heard Lysol, but I've heard bleach, off-the-shelf douche, rinsing with water, and soda (Coca-cola, Mountain Dew, "Does Diet Coke work too?") They hear it from older people they know and never get sex ed that tells them otherwise.
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