Momentous change is rarely the thing of a moment. When we celebrate (or denounce) the 50th anniversary of the Pill on Sunday – Mother's Day, for the ironists in the crowd – we're picking out the date in an amazingly far-off calendar when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration voiced its approval for a revolutionary form of birth control.
The little pill was going to transform the entire world, according to its wide-eyed backers, who predicted that dependable family planning would be a source of miracles that went well beyond keeping unwanted babies unborn. As often with utopian believers, they were on the right track for all the wrong reasons.
It's taken decades to understand the Pill's effects medically, culturally and politically. — Christabelle Sethna, University of Ottawa
And according to its critics, the Pill was going to destroy the world. As often with moralizing, fearful conservatives, they were right about the disruption but wrong about the direness of the consequences. It was only their stratified world view that suffered an irreversible body blow.
“After 50 years of the Pill, we're still wrestling with the idea of what it means,” says Christabelle Sethna, a professor of women's studies at the University of Ottawa. “Whatever people said at the time, it's taken decades to understand the Pill's effects medically, culturally and politically.”
Indeed, the Pill ended up hastening modernity almost in spite of the early, extravagant claims made for and against it. “The biggest mistake in the early days was to see the Pill as a magic bullet,” Prof. Sethna says. “It was supposed to do all these amazing things – mend unhappy marriages, make sex lives more satisfying, eliminate the need for abortion, eradicate global poverty, stave off communism and solve the population crisis. Those beliefs now seem funny and even poignant.”
Instead of fighting the Cold War and saving Mad Men marriages, the Pill became the marker that separates us from a past belonging to an outmoded people, a drug (and a mode of thinking) that defines a boundary between ancient attitudes and new behaviours – from women's powerful sense of independence in the home and the workplace and the rights of adolescents to take charge of their bodies, to emotional debates over international aid programs and the freedom we now possess to question doctors and drug companies about their contributions to our well-being.
A revolution less in sex than in conversation
Freeing up sex now looks like the least of the Pill's many achievements, despite media fascination with the subversive role it played in rousing the bedrooms of the nation.
As late as the end of the 1960s, says Elaine Tyler May, author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation, four-fifths of the women graduating from universities were still virgins.
Every study in the last 15 years demonstrates that it would be political suicide in Canada to start messing with contraception. — John Lamont, president of the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health.
“What was most dramatic about the sexual revolution initially was not how much people changed their sexual behaviour but how much more they talked about it. The Pill accelerated that conversation; it didn't create it.
“But in the long term, I think big public discussions generate changes in behaviour,” Prof. May says.
After five decades of those conversations, women's ability to control their fertility undeniably determines the innermost workings of our society and our economy. Government ministers may talk openly of restricting foreign-aid funds for family planning in developing countries – with the implication that Canada could come next. But Stephen Harper is politically attuned enough to mute the chatter.
“Every study in the last 15 years demonstrates that it would be political suicide in Canada to start messing with contraception,” says John Lamont, president of the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health.
Messing with sex education, the most basic and universal format of conversation about birth control, still has a political advantage, to judge from Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's climb-down on proposed curriculum changes. But however much traditionalists prefer to keep a reverent silence on sexual matters, after 50 years of the Pill young people have found their way to an openness unknown a few decades ago.
