Ancient silver coin from Cyrene depicting a stalk of Silphium
Over the years, I’ve read various books and theories on herbal birth control and contraceptives that might have been used to prevent embryonic implantation or as old-fashioned ‘morning after pills’ in the years prior to modern hormonal birth control options.
There have been novels where the characters have tried a variety of folklore options: high doses of vitamin C or even citrus suppositories (lemon wedges appropriately wedged!), pennyroyal remedies and tea infusions (though this is more technically an abortifacient in actual practice and not birth control), sheeps-gut condoms tied with tourniquet-style strings, wild carrot seed, rutin, etc.
These options were not full proof, despite literary claims to the contrary.
Ancient silver coin from Cyrene depicting the fruit & seed of silphium
Today, however, in a random web search about something else, I saw this article about an apparently extinct Mediterranean fennel plant with the English name laserwort (despite the fact that it has never actually existed during the era in which English has been spoken). More creditably called silphium by contemporaries, it was highly regarded for its contraceptive properties.
It allowed people to freely express their love for each other.
In the end, whatever the reason, the plant ceased to exist, and we are left with only drawings and this infamous symbol of love. Long may you remember it is associated not with that organ in your chest, but with a woman’s freedom to express her affection and sexuality.
I have often wondered why a woman was not afforded the same rights as a man. To love freely and express that love, with whom she chose as the spirit moved her. Men who do this are venerated and admired as playas with game. Women who own their sexuality are called sluts or loose.
A woman bears the same equal rights as a man when it comes to sexuality and affection. According to this coin, twas always thus. I think sometimes people forget that.
The extinction of silphium just goes to show that our world developed with everything we originally needed in it – even birth control!
But we humans had to go on and screw it up. Without reliable birth control, what options did women then have? Enforced loyalty in marriages they didn’t choose, death by childbirth, abstinence, unreliable and dangerous post-coital menstrual stimulants and abortifacients.
Great choices, they were. (Not.)
S
This moves me very much. Endless images from the seemingly endless history of women’s abuse and enslavement from lack of birth control.
The scene in Anna Karenina when she reveals to her friend and defender Dolly that she uses birth control, a sea sponge if I remember correctly. Anna says she cannot get pregnant again, it will make her unattractive to Vronsky. Dolly is horrified and fascinated, has never heard of such a thing, but in the end sees it as one more sign of Anna’s inevitable dissolution and break from reality, that she would take control over her own body to prevent pregnancy, that she would go against God.
There is a wonderful horrible film by Claude Chabrol with Isabelle Huppert called Story of Women (Une Affaire des Femmes) about the last woman ever guillotined in France. She was providing abortions in Nazi-occupied France and was executed for it.
One woman who comes to her has had six children in six years. They live in abject poverty. She is dying from exhaustion and despair. She hates her children and hates herself and her husband , who is not a bad man, has sex with her every night in the bed where some of their children sleep, because that’s his right and her duty. She is pregnant again, she knows nothing of birth control. This is based on a true story in the 1940s.
Teach your children well
Their mothers’ hells
Will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
It is well known by the power seekers on this earth that to deny women birth control, including by abortion, is to enslave them. They want that power. They will never stop seeking it.
Great post. Thank you.
In many respects, knowledge is power – especially for women. There are little things women can do to make conception less likely, but affordable, accessible contraceptive methods are by far the most reliable – natural or medicinal. Unfortunately, in my mind the medical establishment downplays the problems of long-term hormonal options and relies on their effectiveness. So a full knowledge of options and risks is really hard to accurately analyze by each female/couple.
That all being said, silphium might have worked well, but it was expensive. And it wasn’t socialized – there wasn’t enough of it.
S