Turning Points in Australian History by Martin Crotty

Author:Martin Crotty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNSW Press
Published: 2011-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

11

JANUARY 1961

THE RELEASE OF THE PILL: CONTRACEPTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND THE ‘SEXUAL REVOLUTION’

Frank Bongiorno

There is a satisfying chronological convenience about the arrival of the contraceptive pill (‘the pill’) at the beginning of a decade seen as heralding a ‘sexual revolution’. Like the inauguration of President Kennedy in the USA, the pill’s appearance marked a new frontier announcing the arrival of the ‘swinging sixties’. But was there a connection between these two phenomena: the development of the most reliable contraceptive technology in history and the ‘sexual revolution’? We need to be careful of such easy associations in judging the pill’s impact, for it was married women who were its most enthusiastic users, at least initially. Young single women and homosexual people –more emblematic of the sexual revolution than married straights –found it either difficult to obtain or irrelevant. But the pill’s arrival was indeed a crucial moment in Australian history. It was crucial as a symbol of sexual revolution but also for its substantial impact on the lives of millions of Australians. No previous contraceptive technology achieved anything like its almost complete reliability and, largely as a result, none assumed such an ascendancy over all rivals as had the pill by the 1970s. The pill opened to women and men the promise that had been held up to them in decades of sex-advice literature but never fulfilled by any previous contraceptive technology: intercourse for pleasure and companionship without fear of pregnancy.

Early proponents of the pill mainly took for granted that its role was to aid marital ‘adjustment’, assist couples in achieving a closer ‘spiritual communion’ and strengthen heterosexual monogamy.1 It would make women freer, but only within the context of marriage and the family. An Adelaide doctor, for instance, claimed that by removing fear of an unwanted pregnancy, the pill would make a wife a more willing sexual partner for her husband: ‘If he is not sexually satisfied, he may become inconsiderate, uncooperative and not infrequently a disturbing influence upon domestic harmony.’ The ‘harmony pill’–as he believed it should be called–would help overcome female sexual frigidity in the interests of marital adjustment.2 These comments suggested a deep continuity with marriage guidance and sexual advice before 1960 but it was soon clear that the pill was opening far greater possibilities for the reconstitution of gender relations than most family planners envisaged.3 Women, whether married or unmarried, might be liberated from the tyranny of their wombs and ovaries.4 Yet at the same time as it gave women unprecedented control over their own reproductive systems–that is, in contrast with common ‘male’ forms of birth control such as the condom and withdrawal –the pill also somewhat paradoxically enhanced the medical profession’s role in contraception.5 The oral contraceptive, requiring a prescription, was cloaked in the ‘respectability’ of medical science in a way that no diaphragm or condom ever was.6 And in common only with the intra-uterine device (IUD) and its forerunners, which also required a doctor’s intervention, it separated contraception from the act of intercourse itself. In the process, the pill did much to encourage more open discussion of sexuality in the media.

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