One Pill to Change
the World
Today there are over 100 million women worldwide using some
form of oral contraceptive. All these drugs originate from the pill Enovid,
first issued by U.S Food and Drug administrative on June 23rd 1960. Originally
released as an aid to help ease menstrual cramps and PMS symptoms in the U.S three
years earlier, the drug was soon re-branded as a new form of contraception.
The emergence of Enovid was met with resistance and
backlash, particularly from traditionalist conservatives. Buying the
contraceptive prevented many women from using it, one dose in 1960 was priced
at $10 or $80 roughly in today’s currency luckily its price decreased after the
first year due to its incredibly high demand.[1]
Many still faced complications when trying to access the drug for several years
in America. Despite its use being legalised in America in 1960, not until
Griswold v Connecticut in 1965 was the drug available in all U.S states.
Further resistance came from religious
institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, with the sexual revolution of
the 1960s and freedom that the oral contraceptive provided being portrayed as a
pathway to premarital sex and promiscuity in women. Figures show that in 1963,
several years after the drugs release, 80% of American women believed
premarital sex was morally wrong as opposed to in 1975 when this number
dropped to 30%. This statistic highlight how the emergence of the new
contraceptive pill gave women new freedoms to have many sexual partners without
fear of pregnancy. As a result the very nature of sex could said to have
changed from a religious, duty of a married couple to an act of pleasure and
expression. This in many ways is how the second wave of feminism in the 1960s
is portrayed, as part of a sexual revolution.
Through a modern perspective and
understanding the contradictions regarding sexual freedoms before and after
Enovid, it would not be far stretched to believe the real reason for much of
the resistance of the contraceptive was through fear of change to the social
order. Author Joanne Meyerowitz suggests that stereotypes of the housewife
model ‘served as conservative reminders that all women, even publicly
successful women, were to maintain traditional gender distinction’.[2]
The inescapable portrayal of women as domesticated wives really discouraged the
growing call for sex equality.
The significance of the early oral contraceptive is clear
just by seeing the number of women using the drug. By 1963 2.3 million women
were using Enovid. Times magazine wrote that “No previous medical phenomenon
has ever quite matched the headlong U.S. rush to use the oral contraceptives
now universally known as ‘the pills.’”[3]
The nature of sex had also change. The act was no longer seen as a way of
conception, rather of intimacy and pleasure, an attitude considered taboo. Furthermore,
the drug ensured that the risk of pregnancy was minimal and some form of
control over their own lives could be a reality for the women using Enovid. Certainly
the drug did not prompt change on its own but was rather a huge leap in the
fight for future freedoms and the progression of the feminist movement.
[1] Megan
Gibson, ‘One Factor That Kept the Women of 1960 Away From Birth Control Pills:
Cost’, http://time.com/3929971/enovid-the-pill/,
June 23 2015. Accessed 13/11/2017.
[2]
Joanne Meyerowitz, Beyond the Feminine
Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946- 1958, The Journal
of American History, Vol. 79, No. 4, (March 1993), p.1460.
[3] Megan
Gibson, ‘One Factor That Kept the Women of 1960 Away From Birth Control Pills:
Cost’, http://time.com/3929971/enovid-the-pill/,
June 23 2015. Accessed 13/11/2017.
No comments:
Post a Comment