Actually Lysol was advertised as a contraceptive. Let's dig in. https://twitter.com/AlwaysThinkHow/status/1138111937319825414

The best article on this history is by Andrea Tone. Anything I say will be a retread of her smart research See: https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article-abstract/29/3/739/976406?redirectedFrom=PDF

To understand how Lysol was very much about birth control, let's take a look at just one advertisement and the images used. Look at the woman with the wedding ring on her finger. Note the calendar on the background signifying a fear of a missed period from unwanted pregnancy.

Let's turn to the text, which emphasizes covertly women's "fear" of unwanted pregnancy. Here is the key phrase: "neglected marriage hygiene."
The ad then instructs consumers to use lysol to kill "germs" i.e. sperm. Use Lysol, the ad says, for "peace of mind" about having sex.

Of course, to avoid violating the law, Lysol and other douches wrote in code. But women and men knew what Lysol was selling and purchased the product as a contraceptive. There are numerous reports of the injuries women sustained from applying Lysol as a contraceptive douche.

As Tone points out in her important article, because Lysol didn't explicitly advertise itself as a contraceptive, women could not sue its manufacturers for injury and when the product didn't work.

Here's another image from a Lysol ad. It's nearly identical to the image above. Same ideas: Calendar, upset woman, wedding ring. Same selling point: Lysol will prevent pregnancy / missed periods.

Here's the accompanying text with the above image in case you missed the visual clues.

And in case we weren't sure that this was about sex and pregnancy, here's a Lysol ad directed at husbands. Here, men are instructed to tell their wives to get wise to contraceptives.

Let's zoom in to the key text. Note how much innuendo is used to talk about sex, contraception and fears of unwanted pregnancy.

Here's yet another image featuring a woman with a wedding ring holding a crumpled calendar page crying on a bed. In case we don't "get the picture" the text offers us a way to crack the code without saying "birth control." Instead, we have "calendar fear."

In sum, Lysol marketed itself as a contraceptive in all but name through the use of visual and written codes under a system that banned contraceptive advertising. Consumers read between the lines and were burned literally and figuratively by the law and these bogus products.

I'm going to add an important #histsex addendum: the instructional booklet that the makers of Lysol sent out to folks who requested it about how women should use the product as a contraceptive. Publication date: 1932.

Finally, I really do have a podcast where I talk about the history of sexuality. I hope you'll tune in. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/sexing-history/id1264132399

If you needed even more evidence.... this one from a Canadian paper. (Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 1934)

Another postscript. The person I replied to told me I had my history wrong and cited Margaret Sanger as an authority. Here's Sanger in 1917 and 1922 advising using Lysol as a douche to kill sperm.

https://archive.org/details/39002086349256.med.yale.edu/page/11

One more postscript. Folks have been asking me if I have contemporary primary sources showing how folks interpreted these Lysol advertisements. Here are some pages from Facts and Frauds in Woman's Hygiene by Rachel Lynn Palmer and Sarah K. Greenberg. This book is from 1936.

Palmer and Greenberg (a doctor) did an extensive expose on Lysol. They make explicit what the Lysol ads left to code and highlight the brutal consequences of using this harsh chemical as a contraceptive (among other uses).

Here's some more of their 1936 study.

Bonus content. You've got this far so I'm going to add higher resolution images.