The Pill: Sexual Liberation?

At least 160 million people worldwide take some form of the contraceptive pill. So where did it come from? Who invented it and why? And how has it changed the world? Kate is joined by Donna Drucker, author of 'Contraception: A Concise History' and historian from Columbia University. Together they discuss whether the contraceptive pill has been a force for liberation. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 1:59Kate Lister?

  Hello my lovely Betwixters, it's me Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixter Sheets. This is a spicy podcast. This is a saucy podcast. This is the kind of podcast that might make your granny clutch her pearls. Well, not my granny and probably not your granny too, but you know what I mean. So in order to protect everybody, I do have to let you know, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. We call that the fair do's warning because fair do's, we did warn you, so now you can't get upset with us. Right, on with the show.

• 2:40Kate Lister?

  In 1975, country music superstar Loretta Lynn dropped one of her most successful, not to mention her most controversial songs. It was titled "The Pill", and it told the story of a young woman who's decided to go and have herself some fun because she has got a reliable contraceptive, now the pill. She says she's sick of having baby after baby after baby while her husband goes out at night chasing other women, but oh, how the tables have turned. We would play you some of that song right now, but frankly, we couldn't afford the licensing fee, but trust me, it is a belter of a tune.

• 3:20Kate Lister?

  And there is no doubt that the arrival of the contraceptive pill in 1960 changed everything. And Loretta Lynn was a woman who knew about it. She had six children, four before the age of 20. Yikes. The pill promised liberation for women, but at what price? How much do we really know about its dark and troubling history? Who was it tested on, for example? And what were the early side effects like? Heads up, it's pretty gruesome. So let's break out the synthetic hormones and find out more.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  What do you look for in a man?

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Oh, money, of course.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  I make perfect compliments of whatever my body needs by just turning it up and pushing the button.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 4:24Speaker 05

  Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry.

• 4:32Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. When the pill was first introduced, it was rightly heralded as a game changer, an emancipatory tool that allowed women to control their reproductive systems for the first time. But this was a very hard-won battle and it's one that's still being fought all around the world to this very day. So what part did the pill play in the social emancipation of women? And what can we learn from its complex history? Today, I am joined by Donna Drucker, author of Contraception: A Concise History, who is a historian at Columbia University.

• 5:13Kate Lister?

  We are going to dive into the early history of the pill, how it was tested, who it was tested on, and just how mad some of the early versions of this were. Are you ready to do this? I'm ready to do it. Let's crack on.

• 5:30Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Donna Drucker. How are you doing?

• 5:37Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm doing very well. How are you?

• 5:39Kate Lister?

  I'm so excited to talk to you about this. I'm surprised we haven't had this as a subject before now, but I'm thrilled we've saved it just for you. You are the author of Contraception: A Concise History, and we're here to talk about the pill. But before we get to the pill, can I ask you, what was the origin story of that book? Do you remember when you had the moment of like, I must write about this?

• 6:04Speaker 06

  Yes, I did my PhD dissertation on Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Reports.

• 6:09Kate Lister?

  I'll do it.

• 6:10Speaker 06

  And in studying them, I realized that he hardly ever talked about...

• 6:16Speaker 06

  The role of contraception in sexual behavior.

• 6:19Kate Lister?

  He doesn't.

• 6:21Speaker 06

  And being so deep in his kind of thinking and world, I didn't really pay that absence all that much attention at first. But then I thought, wait a minute, of course contraception will play a very significant role in people's decision to have sex or not. And so I thought, well, I want to understand the history of contraception better so I can understand its role in the history of sexuality. And that's the origin of the book.

• 6:51Kate Lister?

  I never really clocked that before. I've read Kinsey a number of times. And no, he doesn't mention contraception in that very much at all. I'm trying to think, does he say anything about it at all?

• 7:04Speaker 06

  Not really. I think he omits it or puts it to the side because contraception was really kind of one of the only ways that scientists could could talk about sexual behavior. And my thinking is that he thought it was kind of a well-studied topic and he wanted to turn the conversation about sexual behavior to actual sex and not focusing on, you know, how to prevent pregnancy. But it's just speculation.

• 7:32Kate Lister?

  Well, good call. For anybody who's listening, who isn't aware of who Kinsey is and what he did, could you give us a very quick overview?

• 7:40Speaker 06

  Sure. Alfred Kinsey was an American scientist. He was originally an entomologist. He studied a species of insect called the gall wasp. And in the late 1930s, he became interested in human sexual behavior, in part because he was writing textbooks on science education and realized that they really said nothing about human sexual behavior. And also because students were starting to come to him to ask other questions about biology. And he thought, I should start a marriage course. And so in 1938, he begins a marriage course for students who are engaged or in the early years of marriage.

• 8:25Speaker 06

  It takes off like gangbusters and then he realizes time to leave the goal wasps behind. You know, he starts interviewing people up in Chicago and Indianapolis. The marriage course gets left behind and it kind of is more sort of snowballs into the two large volumes, one called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, one called Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. They come out in 1948 and 1953 and they're these enormous compendiums of human sexual activity that still have resonance in sexology today.

• 9:02Kate Lister?

  And it was a proper earthquake moment. I mean, ever since then, there's been a lot of scientists going back to it going, um, excuse me, Kinsey, just a second there. Just, I think we might have some issues with bits and pieces of this. But what it did is it normalized a lot of taboo sexual behaviors. It said things like masturbation is pretty much a universal experience, sexual dysfunction, lesbianism, gay, all of these kinds of sexual things. It basically said that it's not a moral issue. This is normal human behavior.

• 9:35Speaker 06

  Absolutely, absolutely. He, he documents incredibly wide range of behavior, thought, desire, experience. And listeners may know him from the zero to six scale, what's called the Kinsey scale, which is something you can take a quiz about online, but really you just need to look at it, which just places people on a scale from zero to six in terms of how heterosexual they are to how homosexual their feelings, desires, behaviors are.

• 10:05Kate Lister?

  I love that. And he, this came out, as you said, in the 40s and 50s. And recently, I've been doing some research around the history of sex ed. And it's really interesting that, because when you were saying that he started his course on married life, what you notice is that wherever any brave soul attempts to do this, to give people the education they need, often around contraception as well, is there's an absolute mad scramble for it. People are desperate for this information. And then the authorities get involved and it all gets Shut down and it's like, well, you can't do that. There was a pamphlet that was printed in London. It came from an American one. It was like fruits of the something or other. At one point they were printing like over a thousand a day, just trying to get this information out there. And then it all got shut down.

• 10:50Kate Lister?

  People must have been absolutely starved for this kind of information about sex.

• 10:55Speaker 06

  Absolutely. I mean, he was teaching at Indiana University, which wasn't, to some extent, still is in rural southern Indiana. And, you know, you couldn't read any books about it. If you were just an average student, you might have seen like some kind of skin magazine, but it would be very hard to hard to find films, nonexistent television wasn't popular yet. So there really wasn't any source of information besides maybe your friends giving you poor information, maybe a doctor telling you to abstain and kind of your own, your own experience.

• 11:30Kate Lister?

  The levels of sexual ignorance, they must, especially around contraception. And what kind of contraception was even available in the 1940s and 50s?

• 11:41Speaker 06

  40s and 50s. I'll say men, for anyone with male anatomy, would be condoms.

• 11:48Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 11:48Speaker 06

  Although they would also not be all that easy to find if you didn't have a lot of courage to ask the pharmacist.

• 11:56Kate Lister?

  A wink, wink, nudge, nudge, something for the weekend, sir.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. Women, only married women in most cases could find a cervical cap or a diaphragm from a physician. But again, they weren't very, they're very popular. You would have had to make a good case for it. They weren't all that easy to insert or remove. So there was a hunger and a need for some other kind of contraception that would be easier to use, be more discreet, less messy. That wasn't as kind of dependent on the moment.

• 12:34Kate Lister?

  Nicely put.

• 12:36Speaker 06

  As other methods were.

• 12:38Kate Lister?

  Can you paint a bit of a picture about why reliable contraception was so important? Because it goes beyond. Just like protecting about STDs, which is also incredibly important. But why at this time, for women in particular, was contraception so badly needed?

• 12:58Speaker 06

  It's a time when, at least in the US, women had the right to vote, but they still didn't have a lot of other rights. So it was very hard to prosecute for sexual assault or rape. On a broader scale, you women couldn't get loans, bank loans or credit cards. And so they're more restricted financially. They have less access to higher education. So if they are pregnant, they're very much tied to a particular man. If, you know, they can get married or they want to get married, but if they don't want to get married, they don't care for the man or he doesn't care for her.

• 13:39Speaker 06

  There is an incredible stigma against unwed mothers. I think, of course, it's not just the case in the US, it's the case in a lot of countries. And so if there's a way to prevent pregnancy for encounters that are pleasurable or not, then that can save a lot of grief, sorrow, despair, financial ruin.

• 14:02Kate Lister?

  It goes, really does, contraception really does go to the heart of women's liberation in so many different ways. The ability to control how many pregnancies you have, because we're existing in a system where women are financially dependent upon men, especially if they get pregnant, you have to get married, he's going to support you. But having all of those babies, I don't know, like, what's the largest family number you've ever seen in your research? I've seen some, like, shocking ones.

• 14:31Speaker 06

  Maybe around 20, I think.

• 14:33Kate Lister?

  It's like, I mean, but, ow. Ow. The physical demand of that, of birthing 20, carrying and birthing 20 babies.

• 14:45Speaker 06

  I can't imagine.

• 14:46Kate Lister?

  Unbelievable, right? And of course, that then has a huge knock on effect, doesn't it? Like, you can't go and get a job or have much of a social life or any of the other stuff if you've got. Twenty babies.

• 14:59Speaker 06

  No.

• 14:59Kate Lister?

  Or even one baby, really.

• 15:01Speaker 06

  If you want to, especially at the time, you know, of course, household chores took a lot more, more time than they do now. They're loveless conveniences. And so if you had more pregnancies, you know, you were also doing all the, taking care of a lot more children with all these other household chores and your husband wasn't going to help. It wasn't his job. So your chance to develop yourself in, in other ways were very, very limited.

• 15:27Kate Lister?

  So you can see there is this huge need for some kind of reliable contraception.

• 15:34Kate Lister?

  I should, I am going to have to tell people now that this history is not quite the yay, well done, guys, that you might have been hoping.

• 15:41Speaker 06

  No.

• 15:43Kate Lister?

  But tell me a little bit about the contraceptive pill and where that came from.

• 15:48Speaker 06

  The contraceptive pill comes out of scientific research on hormones and also on steroids. So once scientists found out the different kinds of hormones in the body and what had a rough understanding of what those, what those hormones can do. Of course, they realized, well, hormones are required for pregnancy. And then the next step in the, in the logic chain is what hormones can be then stopped to prevent pregnancy. And there's really kind of two pharmaceutical companies in the 40s that start investing in this research. I will focus on the US companies. There are some other European companies as well.

• 16:32Speaker 06

  And they're called Syntex and Searl. Their names aren't all that important. But two scientists discover this connection with progesterone. And so Gregory Pincus is a Harvard scientist who ends up getting denied tenure. And he establishes his own research foundation and he's doing research on preventing pregnancy in rabbits, but he doesn't have any money. So.

• 16:59Speaker 06

  The dream team of four that come together in the US are Pinkus himself, Margaret Sanger, who's a longtime birth control advocate since the 1910s. She's promoting the diaphragm cervical cap, but she doesn't have the money, but she has the motivation and the will. Catherine McCormick is the heiress to the International Harvesters Company.

• 17:24Kate Lister?

  Oh, ka-ching. Hello.

• 17:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, so and her husband passes away. He was mentally ill for a very long time. He passes away in 1947 and she has a lot of money. And she also is one of the first woman to have a degree in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So she has the interest and the money. And the last person involved is an obstetrician gynecologist called John Rock. And he's in Massachusetts and he's very Catholic. He's very religious, but he is also seeing the wear and tear on women who can't control pregnancies. And so he is teaching women the rhythm method, or what we would know later as the rhythm method.

• 18:10Kate Lister?

  What is the rhythm method, Donna? And please, it's, please don't do this at home.

• 18:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's something. So as a, this is a sort of a bit of a side, side trip. But I guess in addition to mechanical methods like the condom in the diaphragm, one scientist in Japan and one in Germany discovered the time of ovulation. It was possible, sort of, to time heterosexual sex so that you would reduce the risk of having sex when the woman was ovulating. The Roman Catholic Church loves this method because there's no interference in the act of sex, but it's a way, sort of, again, this is all sort of, it's a way to somewhat control the chance of a pregnancy.

• 19:00Speaker 06

  So Rock is a firm believer. He tries to teach this method. It can sort of work if your legs are very, very rigid about it. But you end up denying your desire because when women are ovulating, that's when they want to have sex because they realize their bodies are like, hello, here we are, all ready to go. But he realizes this isn't practical working. And so he's the one who has access to patients who might be able to test the pill on women. So now the four of them together, their different strengths are able to produce a trial pill. And it is tested. I mean, here comes the, the part where kind of like scientific motivation

• 19:44Speaker 06

  comes into contrast with how we think about contraception now, which is these folks were kind of mostly more interested in population control and

• 19:56Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 06

  than they were in women's autonomy. And so they have collaborators who test the pill on some of Rock's patients with consent, but also involuntarily on women in a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts and also in Puerto Rico.

• 20:17Kate Lister?

  Why did they go to Puerto Rico?

• 20:19Speaker 06

  Puerto Rico because its relationship with the US mainland was changing. There were a lot of wonders about whether Puerto Rico would become the next state. And also it had a burgeoning population and basically no access to any kind of birth control. Pincas had some connections to hospitals and physicians in Puerto Rico. And so an early version of the pill was tested there. At the time, there's not like the apparatus that we think of today with any kind of medical, medical trial, like control groups and, you know, consent forms and oversight, federal oversight and things like that.

• 21:04Kate Lister?

  Who were they testing it on? I mean, Puerto Rico women, but like, what was the demographic of women they were, they were trialing?

• 21:10Speaker 06

  Um, it was mostly women, Puerto Rican women who had

• 21:15Speaker 06

  Probably at least one child to show that they were fertile themselves and they didn't have, they didn't have any fertility problems that would kind of confound the, the results. So they found like nurses in hospitals, they went into poor neighborhoods to ask women to give this a try. And a number of women did go through the trial and they find that the pill works, but it also comes with tremendous side effects.

• 21:47Kate Lister?

  Because the hormone levels were really high, weren't they?

• 21:51Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 21:52Kate Lister?

  What are we talking about here? What kind of things were being reported?

• 21:55Speaker 06

  So in terms of side effects, there's some same side effects we see today and we'll get, get to that, but they're more extreme. So nausea, weight gain, bloating.

• 22:10Kate Lister?

  Migraines.

• 22:11Speaker 06

  Migraines, more seriously, blood clots and strokes.

• 22:15Kate Lister?

  Oh, wow.

• 22:16Speaker 06

  Yeah. So Pincus and his collaborator in Puerto Rico, it's a woman physician named Idris Rice Ray. And they recognize the side effects, but they're not all that concerned about them. They think the pill is so good, it's so effective, it will do wonders for, you know, population control. And these women are just complaining.

• 22:44Kate Lister?

  So they knew about these side effects? They'd seen them?

• 22:47Speaker 06

  Oh, sure. Oh, absolutely.

• 22:49Kate Lister?

  And they went, stuff and nonsense. You're just making a big fuss about nothing.

• 22:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Women are making a fuss. Like the benefits outweigh the costs from our perspective. And so the pill is eventually approved in the US for regulation of menstruation in 1957. And then it is approved for contraceptive purposes in 1960. And then the story changes quite a bit.

• 23:28Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Donna after this short break.

• 23:45Kate Lister?

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• 27:10Kate Lister?

  Birth control advocates, you know, cozying up to e-genicists aside, which is always horribly disappointing whenever you study this history because you're rooting for people so hard. You're like, Margaret Sanger and Mary Stokes, my god, I want you to be a hero, but why are you doing the awful thing? Stop it. But anyway, that's just what happened. But it was controversial, the birth control movement. It was, people got into a real twist about it. So when, when these guys came back from Puerto Rico and went, we've got the pill. How was that received?

• 27:45Speaker 06

  It was seen as a major social shift because it could change interpersonal relationships. So a woman could now take a pill and control her fertility without telling her husband or her male partner. And lots of nation states were like, hello, okay, we can use this to control our populations. We can, we can keep people. We don't want to be having children from having more children and we can take it away from people. We do want to have children. So it becomes part of a global interest in

• 28:28Speaker 06

  population control, either to forward the number of children for certain people or to limit the number of children other people have, of course, very much tied up in racism.

• 28:41Kate Lister?

  Yeah. And it's all sounding depressingly familiar even today, isn't it, with the pronatalist movement? So in the early days then, was it a case that you could just go down to your local pharmacist and say, hello, I'm a woman who'd like to have sex, please? I like the pill.

• 28:58Speaker 06

  No.

• 28:59Kate Lister?

  No.

• 29:01Speaker 06

  Surprise. It was at first very hard to obtain, especially if you were not married.

• 29:09Kate Lister?

  Gotta be married, number one.

• 29:10Speaker 06

  Yes. The rights of unmarried people to have contraception or to have access to it wasn't permitted until 1973. And so for a good 13 years after the pills approved, you could get it in that period, but it wasn't federally allowed. Even married people officially couldn't get it until 1965. And so it spreads like wildfire across countries. It's not that hard to formulate. So lots of different companies start to make it, get the patent.

• 29:50Kate Lister?

  And they were all side effect free then presumably because those women in Puerto Rico were just making a big old fuss about nothing, right?

• 29:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, the dosage was very high in terms of what we have now. The figures that I have are that the original dose of NOVID was 9.85 milligrams of progestin and 150 micrograms of estrogen. And then by 2012, the average dose was 0.1 to 3 milligrams of progestin and 20 to 50 micrograms of estrogen.

• 30:30Kate Lister?

  Jesus.

• 30:33Kate Lister?

  What was happening to these women then?

• 30:35Speaker 06

  The reporting of side effects finally reaches a critical point about eight or nine years after the pill is introduced in the US.

• 30:47Kate Lister?

  There were deaths, weren't there? This isn't just headaches and sore boobs going on.

• 30:52Speaker 06

  No, no, the blood clots and the strokes were very real, very serious and quite deadly. There was a journalist named Barbara Seaman who ended up writing a book about this called The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, which came out in 1969. And it precipitated, you know, federal hearings about the side effects and the deadly side effects of the pill. And so, over time, the pill effects are diminished due to the lower dosage. But as anyone who's taken the pill knows, you know, different formulations can still generate these same kinds of side effects.

• 31:36Kate Lister?

  Can you either confirm or dispel a myth for me? The reason why, and if you're not on the contraceptive pill, this is a little life lesson for you. The contraceptive pill, you take it all month long, apart from seven days where you either take a placebo or you just stop taking it. And you're supposed to have a period, a bleed, in that break. Can you tell us why they factored that into the design of the pill?

• 32:00Speaker 06

  Yes, so it would mimic your standard menstrual cycle. So it's more of a psychological component of pill-taking, that you suppress your hormones for, you know, 20, 21, 22, 23 days. And then you have like a normal, and I'm using air quotes here, a normal menstrual period in those days.

• 32:27Kate Lister?

  Was that supposed to placate a lot of the naysayers about this, sort of like the Catholic Church and religious figures, that you could have a break so it was more natural?

• 32:38Speaker 06

  It's more for women's psychology. So if you were used to having a menstrual period, if you didn't have one at all, it would sort of be very strange and kind of unsettling. And so this is kind of an imaginary period of sorts to kind of match your, what would it be, a so-called normal monthly cycle.

• 32:58Kate Lister?

  But we don't actually need to be doing that.

• 33:00Speaker 06

  Nope.

• 33:02Kate Lister?

  That's just so shitty. All of those periods and we just didn't need to be having this. Ridiculous.

• 33:09Speaker 06

  So many tampons, so many pills.

• 33:11Kate Lister?

  So many tampons were not needed.

• 33:14Speaker 06

  So many.

• 33:15Kate Lister?

  Right. So what was interesting, I thought, when I was reading into the history of the pill, I can understand why, like, the church might be going, um, no, I very much think not. I can understand why moralists might be freaking out and, but I was quite surprised to find there was some resistance from within the early feminist movement itself. I thought that was really interesting. The argument being that it actually, being on the pill means that some women might feel pressured into having sex with a man, whereas before they could have said no. I was quite surprised to read that.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's, that's a fairly uncommon argument.

• 33:53Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. That in a way, the pill is sort of for men so that they can have sex whenever they want without any consequences. So it's kind of like, it's still in kind of this moral, moral framework that anytime you have sex, you should be prepared to have the consequences of it.

• 34:14Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I'm not a fan of that argument either. We're gonna have to talk about, it's already been quite dark already, but one of the strangest things about this history is that on one hand, in one direction, you've got women fighting for all women to have access to the pill, not just married women, not just women that can pay for it, blah, blah, blah, blah. But going along parallel lines are the fact that the American government and maybe other governments are using the pill on poor people to stop them having children. And you, you start to have, I guess it's not the pill, but enforced sterilizations start to happen as well. And it's really strange that you've got some women saying, we want this, and then other communities going, stop doing this all at the same time.

• 34:59Speaker 06

  Yes, this, this kind of especially comes into play when different means of taking anti-pregnancy hormones come into play. So.

• 35:11Speaker 06

  It's a little harder to regulate or to watch over people taking the pill if you to, you know, have to take it every day. But once it's available, at least in some countries, in a shot, I'm thinking especially the Depo Pervera shot, like, once it's possible to give people a monthly shot or a shot every three months or so, it's much easier to regulate. And so the most prominent historical example of this is in South Africa, where, you know, an apartheid government wanted to reduce the number of black Africans who were becoming pregnant. And so they would have these vans, like healthcare vans, that would go to rural areas and do

• 35:55Speaker 06

  some kind of perfunctory, you know, medical, medical care. But these vans would also be stocked with Depo Pervera. And people would get these shots. They were, they were told that, you know, it would, it was good for them and so on. But of course, it was really to control black African populations.

• 36:13Kate Lister?

  I suppose that's the most obvious and extreme example, but there are examples all over the place of local governments and, and local authorities deciding that they're not going to risk these poor, young women becoming pregnant and injecting them with this, what was it called? The monthly injection pre-

• 36:31Speaker 06

  Depo Pervera.

• 36:32Kate Lister?

  Thank you. That's, that's the one. And it's, when I was first reading about this history, it genuinely shocked him because it's within living memory.

• 36:39Speaker 06

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

• 36:41Kate Lister?

  So that's happening awful. When does the pill become mainstream, I suppose? When, when does it become accessible to everyone and less of a health risk?

• 36:54Speaker 06

  Really, when, I would say probably by the late 1980s, early, early 1990s. It takes time to kind of tinker with the formulations. Some of them are to see what different levels of hormones kind of work for different kinds of people. And then, once the patent expires, then the pill can be manufactured by any company which, you know, has pharmaceutical capacity. And I don't even know how many pills, different combinations of pills there are on the market, you know, 40 or 50 at least. And also, at the same time that, you know, pill formulations were being experimented

• 37:38Speaker 06

  with was also, in addition to Deepak Reddy, you could also get kind of birth control from the NuvaRing. So it was the ring that you inserted in your vagina for three weeks at a time and then took it out to have your kind of so-called normal flow. You could also, much later, have a hormonal IUD. So there used to be, of course, the copper IUD, which still does exist, but also those kind of two technologies kind of come together in the form of a hormonal hormonal IUD, which can last like five to eight years, depending on which one you buy. So the pill isn't kind of just the pill. It's really like this whole

• 38:19Speaker 06

  world of hormonal management of pregnancy or non-pregnancy.

• 38:25Kate Lister?

  It's interesting that you said it probably wasn't until the late 80s or 90s that it was genuinely available for everybody. And hopefully governments had stopped using it to make people infertile without their consent. But I've often heard it linked, said that the the sexual revolution of the 1960s was linked to the pill, that that suddenly the pill arrived and everybody threw off their knickers and started dancing around in wild reckless abandonment. And I just wonder, as someone that studied this history, is that over simplistic? What do you think?

• 38:59Speaker 06

  In a way, it just kind of sounds right. Like, here comes the pill. And then, right, everywhere, you know, there's, it becomes like a plot point in movies, like Prudence and the Pill.

• 39:11Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Speaker 06

  And it's kind of made fun of, it enters popular culture. And so it just seems like, right, but in in reality, it's much harder to to trace. There's so much else happening in the 1960s that would kind of potentially contribute to kind of feelings of sexual freedom. And again, we're thinking sexual freedom for for who and under what condition, at what age, what social class, and so on. And so it kind of that idea of connecting the pill and the sexual revolution kind of loops back around to that argument you brought up a few moments ago about was the pill really

• 39:57Speaker 06

  for women? And in a way, you could see that the pill is something that's great for for heterosexual men in a way that they don't have to worry about getting women pregnant anymore. So it's great for them, but the women can enjoy sex too, of course, but they're still the ones whose bodies are experiencing, you know, all the potential changes and side effects of the pill. So it's not quite as freeing for them.

• 40:32Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Donna after this short break.

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• 41:49Kate Lister?

  I think it was Time Magazine who listed the pill as one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, because once, you can't move past the dark and the nasty history of it, but the impact of this, of this drug, was undoubtedly colossal on women and on women's freedom. What was the long-term result of being able to reliably control your fertility?

• 42:17Speaker 06

  It's really extraordinary in a lot of ways, because it's also a different way of thinking about medicine, because it's a preventative, but it's also taken by people who are healthy. And it also could be taken for someone's entire fertile life, you know, 40 years or so. So it really changes how people think about medicine and what medicine can and cannot do for your body. And again, it does change, for women who are taking it voluntarily, of course, it changes their own heterosexual relationships. And so they

• 43:01Speaker 06

  have more control over deciding when to be pregnant, when, when not to be, although it can also be a point of coercion if someone, if a partner, you know, takes your pills away, or doesn't allow you to refill your prescription or things like that. And it changes kind of states' relationship to its population, because states now recognize, well, you know, we could use this to control who gives birth, but also, like in Eastern Europe, from the 60s, you know, through about 1991, the pill was hardly available at all.

• 43:40Speaker 06

  And that was in part because countries like Romania were also outlawed abortion, because Romanian government wanted to promote births. And the pill was seen as sort of like this decadent Western invention. So it's unevenly accepted and spread throughout the world, but it also, you know, changes women's relationships with their bodies, with medicine, with men, between them and the state. It upends all kinds of relationships.

• 44:12Kate Lister?

  I read one article about the history of the pill and it made a point I hadn't even considered before, said that being able to control when you have a baby meant that women could become more established at work or more established in their careers. I'd even thought of that. And it made the point that it was pretty, like, why would a woman go to university in like the 1940s? Because she was inevitably going to have to get married and have a baby. And then whatever career she'd had, she was gonna have to give it up because you can't do that with a baby. And it made the point that being able to control that means that women can get pregnant later in life. So they're more established in their work. They can have a career. I thought that was fascinating. Do you think that's true?

• 44:52Speaker 06

  Uh, yes, because I don't know about other countries, but I know in the US, um, it was until the seventies, it was perfectly legal to fire someone if they got pregnant.

• 45:02Kate Lister?

  Yes, yes.

• 45:03Speaker 06

  And so if women could take the pill, then they can avoid being fired. I mean, there's, you kind of think about the sexual revolution argument, like, oh, it's a way to let people have more pleasure and can encourage like enjoyment, you know, without the fear of pregnancy. But it's also, in a way, the pill's a very practical tool for managing your employment status and your, and your finances before laws protected you against being fired.

• 45:32Kate Lister?

  So as a final question, then, we should probably talk about the future of the pill specifically. Will men ever get a pill all of their very own?

• 45:44Speaker 06

  Well, it's, people have tried.

• 45:47Kate Lister?

  What's the issue?

• 45:48Speaker 06

  It has side effects.

• 45:50Kate Lister?

  Has side effects.

• 45:54Speaker 06

  I know. So there was a international study done between 2008 and 2012, which was an injectable contraceptive vaccine that included regular doses of both a long-acting progestin and a long-acting androgen, you know, which kind of suppresses sperm production. It was tested on men who were in a long-term, monogamous partnership for at least one year. And after the test was over, men's sperm count would return, turn to normal. It had an effectiveness rate of 92.5%.

• 46:33Kate Lister?

  Okay, that sounds good, but isn't the pill at like 99?

• 46:37Speaker 06

  Something like that. But a independent data, safety and monitoring committee established by the WHO terminated the study early due to men's complaints and their complaints were all the same ones that women had been putting forward since the 1950s, you know, headaches, dizziness, weight gain, loss of libido, all that kind of thing. And of course, when the study was terminated, there was lots of conversation like, oh, poor men couldn't

• 47:08Kate Lister?

  I think I remember this now.

• 47:10Speaker 06

  You know, handle what women handle all the time, but fact of the matter is it did, the study was terminated based on their complaints. And so there are other kinds of like anti sperm like gels in particular that are being tested for men now, but there still has not been a major advancement in the technology of contraception for, you know, decades.

• 47:39Kate Lister?

  Do you think there ever will be? And also I just, as somebody like I would be the one that gets pregnant, I just can't ever envision a situation where I would be in flagrante with a gentleman and he would say, don't worry, I'm on the pill. And I would think, well, that's all right then sunshine.

• 47:57Speaker 06

  It's not an easily solvable

• 48:00Kate Lister?

  No, it's not, is it?

• 48:01Speaker 06

  Because some women would just love to give all the responsibility to a partner and just enjoy their lives, enjoy their experiences. But it can be very hard to give that level of trust over to, you know, especially if you're in a, not in a long-term, monogamous relationship.

• 48:19Kate Lister?

  If you don't take the pill, I'm getting pregnant.

• 48:22Speaker 06

  Right, so I think a male hormonal contraceptive could work. It likely will in sometime in the next maybe decade or so, but it would only be in very particular kinds of relationships. It wouldn't be for everyone.

• 48:37Kate Lister?

  Donna, you have been fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you?

• 48:45Speaker 06

  I am on Blue Sky or X at Hist of Sex. And you can find my books on Alfred Kinsey, on contraception, on infertility technology, and on machines using sex research at any bookstore. Also at audio and ebook versions. So feel free to find my writing wherever you find your books.

• 49:09Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much for dropping by. You've been marvelous.

• 49:12Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you. It's been a pleasure.

• 49:19Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Donna for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review, and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. Coming up, we are going to find out about the murderous affairs of King James I and VI, and delve into the truth about the minor tour. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 50:07Speaker 07

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