Women have come a long way from using half a lemon as a cervical cap, thank god.
From Time Magazine, a little history lesson on the pill:
The driving force to change all this was a woman born in Corning, N.Y., in 1879 to a Catholic mother and a father who carved angels and saints out of marble. When her mother died at the age of 50 after 18 pregnancies, she confronted her father over her mother’s coffin and charged, “You caused this. Mother is dead from having too many children.”
Margaret Sanger went on to train as a nurse and as early as 1912 was dreaming of a “magic pill” that would prevent pregnancy. She coined the phrase birth control in 1914, the year she was arrested for mailing her magazine the Woman Rebel, an outlaw tract with its discussions of contraceptive use. She jumped bail and fled to Europe but returned two years later and opened the nation’s first family-planning clinic in a squalid tenement section of Brooklyn. Arrested again, she served 30 days. But she did not stop.
Aside from Sanger, the conception of the pill (har, har) involved a Catholic fertility specialist, a rabbit-embryo physiologist, the wife of a millionaire schizophrenic, and a host of Puerto Rican test subjects. But the article covers more than that—it touches on the social and public policies that birth control helped shape over the last 50 years, misconceptions about the pill, and why women across the country still have to fight for access to comprehensive family planning options.
The entire article’s worth a read if you are a woman or ever vacation in one.
Very informative.
Sounds like we should grant Statehood to Puerto Rico in memory of all their hard work on this.
Yams, it’s all about yams.
Thank you, Mother Sanger! Overall she had some pretty fucked up ideas about sexuality, but she did women a tremendous service.
Cienna,
Here’s an interesting book review on the history of the “Pill”:
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=…
I shall read this book.
Don’t know if the Time article mentions him–their Web site is perenially fucked up for me–but Stanford chem professor and polymath Carl Djerassi also played an important role in the Pill’s development.
pereNNially
The only reason I am alive is because I was conceived in December, 1958, before the pill was available. The ‘rents went on a day trip to Eastern WA and had to stay overnight because of snow on the passes. Mom didn’t bring her diaphragm because it was just supposed to be a day trip.
Years later, as I grew older, ( I was a really late in life kid) and reviewed the family dynamics involved, I realized I was a mistake. Mom, when confronted, said harriedly “that I was a happy accident.”
Despite my origins I am happy to have had a choice, myself.
a lemon sounds like a very very bad and painful thing to stick up there…. no no no.
Great article though, I’m so glad to be on the pill. So easy.
Thank the only Goddess…
Before you idiots go jerking each other off over how great the pill is, read this…http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/w-hca042910.php
Thanks for posting the article, Cienna. I got through about the first quarter of this at the dentist’s office yesterday, and probably wouldn’t have thought to look online for the rest. I thought you could only access stories from Time and Newsweek and the like if you were a subscriber.