re: #229 Wendell Zurkowitz (slave to the waffle light)

and increase sinful sluttiness by 2500%

/

In the last episode of Downton Abbey (I confess I’m hooked), Lady Mary is planning a week-long rendezvous with Terry Gillingham. She asks her maid, Anna, to go to the druggist to buy “protection.” The year is 1924. Neither woman uses the actual word; they talk around the issue and point to an illustration in a book. Mary is unmarried, so she doesn’t want to visit the local druggist, but Anna is married (and actually childless so far), so she agrees to go. When she sees the male pharmacist behind the counter, she asks for a woman to wait on her. Anna gives her a fake story about having 6 kids and, worried about health, she wants to prevent another pregnancy. The starchy lady sells her the item and Anna bolts out of the shop without scooping up her change and the instructions for the item’s use.

We’ve come a long ways in 90 years, but some RW prudes would still like to make contraception a source of shame and humiliation, as it was in 1924.

I wondered if the book referred to in the episode was Margaret Sanger’s.