Bronson is proud to be partnering with Cavallo Modern Vintage to produce and distribute select artifacts from the Bronson product universe to the general buying public. Watch this space. More to come. Operators are standing by.

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A reader asks;

“Is the rumor true that some US servicemen would sneak Bronsons overseas to have them ‘customized’ in France or Spain? I was told stories by my grandfather of magnificent, yet terrifying, ruby studded, and silver plated vaginas. Is this true?”

This is true.

When Bronson partnered with the house of Fabergé to produce their first jewel-encrusted “Imperial Vagina” in late 1887 for the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, their flawless craftsmanship and florid design captured the imagination of Europe’s cultural elite. At the time, however, they failed to make a huge splash in nouveau-riche America, where tastes were still more practical. It wasn’t until decades later, when Cartier decided to reprise the concept in the Art Deco design landscape of New York in the 1930’s, that the broader American aesthetic became receptive to such decadent, inguinal excess.

That’s not to say there was no demand at all, however. During that period from 1890-1930, lesser European jewelers did do some custom work for American military officers whose tours overseas brought them a more cosmopolitan perspective, and therefore sought to improve their wives’ intrinsic as well as aesthetic value. The less scrupulous of these jewelers (mostly the damned Spaniards) would even place false hallmarks on their work – a shameful practice which confounds the antiques trade to this day.

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.)