Storks: symbols of fecundity or harbingers of unwanted pregnancy?

Upon entering the exhibition Virtue, vice, and contraband: a history of contraception in America, you are greeted by imagery of storks, bearing infants, being beaten back or evaded by women who didn’t relish the prospect of motherhood. Such images are perhaps unexpected, but are indeed part and parcel of the iconography of both reproduction and contraception.

Storks atop a tower in Kayersberg, Haut Rhin (Alsace)

The stork, a symbol of fecundity, luck, and prosperity widely used across Europe, has for centuries been associated with childbirth. In Alsace (my favorite part of France) it is the symbol of that French region (more specifically the Haut Rhin département), and indeed storks perch atop spires and chimneys across the countryside. When confronted with the perennial question of where babies come from (awkward!!), a quick parental out is simply to say that “the stork brought them.”

This explanation found visual expression in postcards and announcements sent by prospective and new parents upon the occasion of childbirth. As the predominant icon of childbirth, the stork is closely followed by caggage-patch babies (how many of us recall the frantic parental search for “cabbage patch” dolls at Christmas in the 80s?). Both stork and cabbage patch images are found in abundance in a wonderful book entitled D'où viennent les bébés? by Laura Jaffe and Conce Codina. I came across this book at the Musée Flaubert in Rouen last September and bought a copy for the Dittrick.

Guest curator of Virtue, vice, and contraband Jimmy Meyer collected quite a few postcards with stork iconography, and added them to the Skuy collection last year. Along with the bouyant, cheerful stork images came some less cheery in character -- images of women (and their partners) frantically fending off or fleeing the stork. These postcards showed that not everyone desired a large family, and many eagerly sought some effective and safe way to achieve that goal.

Jim Edmonson

A walk through “Virtue, vice, and contraband.”

For the next several posts, I am going to take you on a walk through the Dittrick’s interpretive exhibition, “Virtue, vice, and contraband: a history of contraception in America.” Along the way, we’ll linger to look closer at particular items -- rare books, images, and artifacts. It’s the largest and most comprehensive exhibit on this topic in North America, and show cases the Percy Skuy collection on the history of contraception that came to the Dittrick in late 2004.

I first saw the Skuy collection in Toronto, at the Janssen Ortho headquarters, and found it quirky, amusing, and informative. Never in my wildest imagination did I think that collection would come our way. Then, in the summer of 2003 Percy called and wanted to know if the Dittrick might wish to provide a home to his collection. It wasn’t a done deal; Percy was in conversation with at least two other museums. But I felt that we had much to offer and mounted a concerted pitch to set forth our cause. The happy outcome: the collection came to Cleveland.



Our next step? Work through the re-interpretation and installation of the Skuy collection in its own dedicated space. That finally came to pass last September when we opened “Virtue, vice, and contraband: a history of contraception in America.” In time, we will offer a virtual version of the exhibition on the Skuy collection website. For the moment, however, I will take you on a stroll through the display, highlighting the curious and the rare, as well as the banal and commonplace. It’s all grist for the mill in our museum, and I can guarantee you that you won’t see this stuff elsewhere. The Skuy collection is one of a kind.

Jim Edmonson

Shoo stork image courtesy of Deanna Dahlsad