In Days of Old

I didn't know anything about Emma Goldman, although the name was vaguely familiar, so I looked her up on Wiki.  It's a really long article, I didn't read all of it, but at least I now know who Emma Goldman was.  She certainly was a busy woman, having been involved in numerous causes, one of which was birth control.  That being a subject near and dear to my heart, I looked it up as well.

Birth control movement in the United States - Wikipedia

I had no idea that birth control had such a long and contentious history, but I should have, since one of the first poems I ever memorized was:

"In days of old, when knights were bold, and rubbers weren't invented, men put socks upon their cocks, and babies were prevented."

I know we have discussed this before, but I still maintain that the word "condoms" was invented in the late 1960s.  Before that everybody called them "rubbers", but that was just their nickname.  The official name was "latex prophylactics".   I know that because there was a rubber machine in the men's restroom of the truck stop where we frequently stopped for breakfast on our way to go hunting in the Kankakee area, and that's what it said on the machine.  Sometime after we last discussed the subject, I checked out the rubber machine in one of our local gas stations and, sure enough, it called them "condoms" instead of "latex prophylactics".  It's like in Orwell's "1984", once a new word or concept becomes brainwashed into the public consciousness, nobody remembers the way it used to be, insisting that it has always been this way.