“Sex Hygiene In and Out of Marriage” lecture flyer
Women’s National Health Council sex talks flyer, from the Historical Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection in the American Medical Association Archives.
Here is a rather curious flyer from the Women’s National Health Council – a sham organization by “professor” L. Ellis Evons – to promote and arrange Evons’ popular lecture series on sex.
The titles (WOMEN ONLY, Prof. L. Ellis Evons, “Sex Hygiene […] Marriage”, “What is Birth Control”) are set in two widths of De Vinne (c. 1892) by Gustav F. Schroeder (1861–1899) and Nicholas J. Werner; while the body texts are set in Cloister Oldstyle (1914) by Morris Fuller Benton, based on the 1470 roman by Nicholas Jenson (c. 1420–1480).
I have not been able to establish what year this flyer is from, but the article that offers some context to the flyer talks about the period of 1934–1938. Amber Dushman from the Department of Records Management and Archives in Chicago, Illinois, writes in her 2018 article entitled Ads and Labels From Early 20th-Century Health Fraud Promotions:
Professor Evons operated out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was widely known for his lecture series on sex. But sex talks weren’t the only thing Professor L. Ellis Evons was selling. He was peddling oxylin antiseptic tablets for guarding against vaginal infections. This poisonous drug was found to contain over 50% boric acid by an FDA inspector.
Gearing his products towards women, he also used these lectures to distribute contraceptives. He advertised himself as a “noted biologist and sexologist.” However, according to correspondence between the AMA and the Better Business Bureau of Philadelphia in 1934, the Bureau of Investigation revealed “he was wholly unknown to [the] science world.”
Professor Evons was operating during a time when the Comstock Laws made discussion and distribution of contraceptives illegal. He used the “Women’s National Health Council,” a sham operation, as a front to arrange his well-attended lectures. Although they were ostensibly free, he did ask for donations from the women who attended. It’s believed that he secretly sold his contraceptives in a back room after these lectures.
In 1935, he was fined for distributing contraceptives in Philadelphia. Just one year prior, he had been arrested in Albany, New York, for giving a lecture on birth control as part of a sting operation that involved the AMA. At the June 1938 annual meeting, the AMA passed policy “so that physicians may legally give contraceptive information to their patients,” reflecting the changing laws and acceptance of dispensing contraceptives as a valid medical practice in the United States.
