American Condom History

The Comstock Act made the burgeoning condom market illegal in 1873:

Condom production ballooned after 1839, when Charles Goodyear’s method of rubber vulcanization kick-started modern latex technologies in the United States. By 1870, condoms were available through almost any outlet you can imagine–drug suppliers, doctors, pharmacies, dry-goods retailers and mail-order houses. It may seem suprising today, but sexual products were openly sold and distributed during much of the 19th century. Then, suddenly, in 1873 Congress passed the Comstock Act, which paralyzed the growing industry; Comstock made it illegal to send any “article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever for the prevention of conception” through the mail.
Jim Edmonson, chief curator at the Dittrick Medical History Center, explains that the law was passed primarily because of a vicious campaign by its namesake, Anthony Comstock. “He was a do-gooder, a reformer, and a religious-minded person,” says Edmonson. “Comstock had been to the Civil War, and was outraged by the sexual excess of soldiers–large numbers of men away from home and church–and the women who made their trade with these soldiers. Comstock felt that condoms and any other forms of contraception were just a license to sexual excess.”
Ostensibly designed to prevent the sale of obscene literature and pornography, the Comstock Act effectively made any form of contraception illegal in the United States, punishable as a misdemeanor with a six-month minimum prison sentence. “So we had a national law criminalizing contraception,” says Edmonson. “It’s hard to believe, but it’s true.”
Comstock’s crusade was aimed at commercialized vice, visible in the red-light districts, erotic paraphernalia, and birth-control products easily accessed in cities like New York during the 1860s. Fearing the widespread corruption of young uneducated minds, Comstock particularly sought to reform salacious newspaper advertising and the illicit mail-order marketplace it supported.

I didn't realize all that.