The opening decade of the 20th century was a strange time of social turbulence and rapid progress in science, industry and medicine. In this new era, some of the utility, history, and even the underlying scientific rationale of retrogenital surrogation began to be questioned by a certain subculture of stunted little malcontents. No less a figure than Constance Paine, heroine of the American Revolution, came under the hairy eye of the Women’s Coital Forbearance League (WCFL) for her historic advocacy of open-fire vaginal cautery as a means of supporting the soldiery – a practice that is widely regarded by practitioners as the prelude to Enoch Bronson’s retrogenital surrogation techniques.
But it would prove to be a bizarre collision of multiple social and medical movements that would skew the arc of history in a challenging direction for Bronson, particularly on the eve of Prohibition.
Harvey Kellogg, well funded by his suddenly popular Corn Flukes, provided the first flakes in what would become an avalanche of doom. His Battlecreek Sanitarium was not only a hotbed for vegetarians, felchisters, scrotal recumbency, and many, many enemas. It was also a haven for “doctors” who performed “healing adjustments” in women who suffered from hysteria, “lawyers” who suffered from hysterical wives, and a large number of women with a keen interest in hot-button social issues like temperance, suffrage, masturbation, and oblong vegetables.
These latter groups found it difficult to come to a consensus on practically anything, but unfortunately, they agreed on one thing – Bronson was the enemy for reasons they couldn’t quite define.
Ladies Against Carrots, the preeminent group agitating for the prohibition of certain undesirable produce, felt that Bronson’s new manual garbage disposal attachment encouraged women into overconsumption of illicit vegetation, and what this might lead to nobody liked to imagine. However, the WCFL praised Bronson’s recently introduced Chastity Tension Spring mechanism – a feature designed in response to a harsh admonishment by the Convocation of Nervous Bishops – which limited the product’s usefulness in any masturbatory exercise. Suffragettes, concerned that Bronson products were rendering women less able to march, predictably weighed in against. But the deciding factor was the vehement opposition of the Temperance movement, whose concerns about the ubiquity of so-called “beefeaters” – women of loose morals who would produce intoxicating liquors in the sturdy innards of their replacement vaginas – would prove chillingly prescient in the decade to come.
Pictured here is an early newsletter of the Suffragette movement in support of Ladies Against Carrots’ planned rally against Bronson Vagina on Long Island. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)