It was August 1998. I had been doing research for this book—a history of the Illinois birth control clinic movement—for almost two years. I had read through the records of the local and national Planned Parenthood offices and gathered material from the popular and medical press. I had also begun to conduct a series of oral history interviews with women who had worked in local Illinois clinics. Slowly my research was coming together. Or so I thought, because it was in that warm month of August that I finally followed the advice of historian Leslie Reagan, drove up to Chicago, and visited the archives of the American Medical Association in order to look through its Historical Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection. It was here that I realized I had to shift my thinking entirely. I had to move beyond the messages that the Planned Parenthood organization had long promoted and, to the extent possible, think like someone from an earlier era, long before the organization had established the authority it now enjoys.

The catalyst for this epiphany lay in the sea of records through which I waded, which revealed the massive contraceptive marketplace that was in full swing by the Depression era. After spending several days sifting through the boxes of documents, I found myself growing ever more dizzy with the maze of contraceptive choices before me.