AN HONEST WOMAN
37
quired, with a jesting shake of the head for Dottie's negligence. His
eyes bantered her as she took out her little blue leather address book
and wrote down his landlady's phone number with a little gold
pencil. "Good-by, Boston," he murmured, and took her long chin
between his thumb and forefinger and waggled it back and forth,
absently. "Remember: no monkey-business; no falling in love. Honor
bright."
Notwithstanding all this, Dottie's heart was humming as she sat,
two days later, beside her friend, Kay Peterson, in the woman doctor's
office suite. Actions spoke louder than words, and whatever Dick
might say, the fact remained that he had sent her here, to be wedded,
as it were, by proxy, with the " ring" or diaphragm pessary that the
woman doctor dispensed. With her hair freshly waved and her com–
plexion glowing from
.a
facial, she had a look of quiet assurance
that bespoke the contented matron. Knowledge had allayed her fears.
To Kay's awed astonishment, Dottie, all by herself, had visited a
birth-control bureau and received the doctor's name and a sheaf of
pamphlets that described a myriad of devices- tampons, sponges, col–
larbutton, wishbone, and butterfly pessaries, thimbles, silk rings and
coils-and the virtues and drawbacks of each. The new device recom–
mended to Dottie by the bureau had the backing of the whole U.S.
medical profession; it had been found by Margaret Sanger in Holland
and was now for the first time being imported in quantity into the
U.S.A., where our own manufacturers could copy it. It combined
the maximum of protection with the minimum of inconvenience and
could be used by any woman of average or better intelligence, follow–
ing the instructions of a qualified physician.
This article, a rubber cap mounted on a coiled spring, came in
a range of sizes and would be tried out in Dottie's vagina, for fit,
wearing comfort, and so on, in the same way that various lenses
were tried out for the eyes. The woman doctor would insert it and,
having made sure of the proper size, she would teach Dottie how to
put it in, how to smear it with contraceptive jelly and put a dab in
the middle, how to crouch in a squatting position, fold the pessary
between thumb and third finger of the right hand, while parting the
labia majora with the left hand, and edge the pessary in, so that it
would snap into place, shielding the cervix, and finally how to follow
it with the right middle finger, locate the cervix or soft neck of the
