17 February 2021

How the Pill Changed What Was Possible For Women

Women were reinvented after 1960 when their biological and social options changed.

Edison tinkered in his lab, famously going through 3,000 iterations on the lightbulb before getting it right. In the early 1900s, scientific theory began to supplement and then replace trial and error, which transformed what was possible.

It was not until 1938 that Congress approved the FDA which, in turn, had to approve new drugs. About 10,000 new drug applications were submitted to the FDA over the next 20 years and an industry was born out of the advances in science that changed the human body.

Perhaps no drug changed the modern world more than the drug that would simply be known as “the Pill.”

In the early 1900s scientists began to understand how hormones – from the Greek word meaning “to incite activity” – affected bodies. “Over the course of a woman’s life, she produces barely one-fifth of an ounce of the hormones known as progesterone and estrogen, but that’s enough to guide her reproductive system – and keep the human race in business.”

The Pill – which manipulated these hormones to allow the body to evade pregnancy – was approved in 1959 just two days after Lady Chatterley’s Lover was approved for publication in the US.

As you might guess, this was met with resistance. In that same year, a Chicago vice squad had arrested 55 news vendors for selling girlie magazines. While a church group sat in the courtroom holding rosary beads and silently praying, the jury voted to acquit the defendants. After the verdict the judge seemed stunned, then slumped forward. He’d had a heart attack.

“In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that the Bill of Rights included a right to privacy and the use of birth control was a private and protected act.”

Catholics argued with Margaret Sanger - the early proponent of birth control - that the rhythm method was superior to contraceptives because it did not interfere with the natural process of life. Sanger retorted that all sorts of things interfered with the natural process of life. Resisting temptation interfered with natural processes. Every time the pope shaved his whiskers he interfered with the natural processes of life. More broadly, this new world full of modern drugs and vaccines interfered with a hundred natural processes and these new drugs had become so prevalent that they came to seem, well, normal.

It wasn’t just conservative Christians who resisted birth control. Only after the Japanese government approved Viagra in 1999 did it finally make the Pill legal.

Since the Pill was approved, birth rates in the US have nearly halved. In 1970, 80 percent of women with young children stayed home to care for the children and 20 percent worked. Today, those numbers have reversed. Women now get more degrees than men. In 1960, women earned 35% of bachelor’s degrees. Today it is about 58%.

Many of these facts were gleaned from Jonathan Eig’s The Birth of the Pill

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