Elaine Tyler May: Promises the Pill Could Never Keep
[Elaine Tyler May, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming “America and the Pill.”]
An end to poverty. A cure for divorce. The elimination of unwed pregnancy. Fifty years ago next month, when the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would approve the oral contraceptive, these were the highest expectations for it. At the same time, few of its promoters in 1960 imagined how the pill, as it quickly became known, would become a powerful tool for transforming women’s lives....
In spite of all the missed predictions, there were at least two people who understood the pill’s revolutionary potential from the beginning: Margaret Sanger, who had first imagined a contraceptive pill in 1912, and Katharine McCormick, a wealthy feminist — both elderly women who had been advocates for women’s rights since the early 20th century, and who teamed up in the 1950s to bring the pill project to fruition. Sanger and McCormick financed the research and found the scientists to conduct it.
Sanger and McCormick anticipated how the pill would be a tool for women’s emancipation. And, indeed, the minute the F.D.A. announced it would be approved, millions of women rushed to their doctors for prescriptions. They would use the pill to gain control of not only their fertility, but also their lives. They could decide whether to have children, and when. They could take advantage of new opportunities for education, work and participation in public life that opened up in the years following the pill’s approval.
Today, women no longer need to choose between having a family and a career. At the pill’s 50th anniversary, that alone is well worth celebrating.