When Everything Changed (23 page)

In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 that Connecticut’s law violated married couples’ constitutional rights, and in 1972 the Court closed the circle by tossing out the Massachusetts law as well, making it clear that the right to use birth control belonged to everyone, not just to married couples. (In 1973, in the ultimate American benediction, the Internal Revenue Service declared that the Pill was a tax-deductible medicine.) All around the nation, women lined up to get prescriptions. “We had an option, so you took it,” said June LaValleur, who had always felt using a diaphragm “kind of broke up the spontaneity of things.”

Unmarried women who did not have a personal physician—or whose family doctor might disapprove—continued to have a harder time, especially if they were not living in big cities with liberal attitudes toward sex. In the 1960s, in most states, the age of adulthood was 21, and it was illegal for a doctor to prescribe birth control to an unmarried woman under that age without a parent’s consent. It was not until the 1970s that Congress, embarrassed by the fact that young men of 18 were being sent off to the war in Vietnam while they were still legally children, passed the Twenty-sixth Amendment, which reduced the age of majority to 18. Until then, even unmarried 20-year-olds generally had to claim they were engaged and on the verge of marriage to cadge a birth control prescription from a physician.

College health services slowly began prescribing birth control pills for students who wanted them, and some parents made sure their children arrived on campus with a supply already in hand. When Tawana Hinton started college in 1970, her mother marched her off to the gynecologist. “It was like, ‘You will go to college on the Pill,’ ” Hinton recalled. “And I did.”

Planned Parenthood clinics were another crucial source—Alison Foster remembered that her boarding school ferried interested students to the nearest clinic. “And when I was in college, it was like candy,” she said. “You just went to the health center and they gave them to you.”
But only 4 percent
of the women who were taking the Pill in 1969 got it through Planned Parenthood, and even those who had the name of a sympathetic doctor were sometimes too embarrassed to follow through. Wendy Woythaler got the Pill while she was at Mount Holyoke in the late ’60s, and when she looks back, she remembers searching for an office down a dark alley: “It was probably a fine, upstanding gynecologist somewhere in town. But when you’re thinking, ‘I’m not supposed to be doing this,’ it feels like you’re going down a dark alley.”

“There was a stigma attached to it if you weren’t married,” said Maria K. “I didn’t want to go to the drugstore and buy birth control pills because everybody would know I was having sex. Oh, heavens!”

“W
HORES DON’T GET PREGNANT
.”

For every Linda LeClair, who seemed to have her finger right on the ’60s zeitgeist, there were many more young women like Maria K. Maria—whose mother had wound up cooking in a home for elderly women when her father died—walked into the new morality without the sophistication to protect herself from its consequences. She got the news she was pregnant while she was working as a secretary at a local college in a small town in upstate New York. “At that time, if you got pregnant, you either got married or you went away and came back unpregnant,” she said.

In 1967, when Maria had her child, the idea that an unmarried woman would simply raise a baby herself was almost unheard-of, particularly in small towns. Most girls just married the father. Others got abortions or went off to homes for unwed mothers, where they gave the baby up for adoption and returned from what was generally described as a long stay with an out-of-town relative. Judy Riff remembered that one of her friends at their all-girls Catholic college got pregnant her sophomore year, “and one minute she was there and the next minute she was gone. It was like she was never there…. I don’t know what happened to her.” The very idea of having a baby out of wedlock “was just so awful… ,” Riff said, “that probably would have to be the worst thing that could have happened to any of us.”

Most women had no idea how to obtain an abortion, which was illegal everywhere until the late 1960s. Maria, who was Catholic, never considered the option. Consulting her parish priest, she went to a home for unwed mothers in a nearby city. She was interviewed on arrival by a “kind, compassionate, and practical” woman who told her that the baby’s chances of being adopted would be low. The man who fathered Maria’s baby was blind, and at a time when adoptive parents had a large supply of illegitimate babies to choose from, any hint of a possible imperfection could be disqualifying. “She said even though it couldn’t be genetically passed on to my son, that he would be very difficult to adopt if it was known that one of his parents was not sighted. And she told me that I seemed like a nice girl and she believed… that I would make a good mother.”

When Maria decided to keep her son, her mother told her that a baby is always a wonderful thing and behaved “like an angel,” her daughter recalled. But otherwise, “I became an outcast.” She had trouble finding a landlord who would rent to an unmarried mother, and she lost her job. “I think they probably thought I was a bad example in the college atmosphere and so forth.” And far worse trouble was around the corner. “About a year and a half later, I was pregnant again. And I was really up a creek.”

When she got the news, Maria broke down in the doctor’s office. “Everybody’s going to think that I’m a whore,” she cried.

“Whores don’t get pregnant,” the doctor said. “They’re smarter than that.”

“R
EMEMBER, ALL OF US HAD TAKEN THE
P
ILL
.”

The Pill had been developed by Dr. Gregory Pincus, a biologist recruited by Margaret Sanger, who was more successful in revolutionizing medical contraception than she was in lobbying the Connecticut state legislature. It posed unique questions when it came to safety. Unlike most medication, it was intended to be taken over long periods of time by healthy women. Risks that might seem acceptable if you were, say, controlling diabetes loomed a lot larger if there was no disease to cure. Cases of blood clotting were reported, and women began to worry that they were being put at risk of heart attacks or strokes. The Food and Drug Administration began research, and in 1970 a Senate committee headed by Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin held hearings on the Pill’s safety. Some women immediately noticed that all the senators doing the investigating were male—no small surprise, since 99 percent of the Senate was of one gender and Margaret Chase Smith couldn’t be everywhere. But all the people invited to speak were men as well. Barbara Seaman, the author of the powerful book
The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill,
had not been invited. There were no women scientists or consumers who had experienced bad effects. “
Remember, all of us
had taken the Pill, so we were there as activists, but also as concerned women,” said Alice Wolfson, who led a protest that disrupted the proceedings.

The FDA eventually ordered that birth control pills come with an insert describing possible health risks, and
a Gallup survey found that
18 percent of those who had been taking the Pill stopped. Many turned to intrauterine devices (IUDs)—until the most popular model, known as the Dalkon Shield, had to be pulled from the market due to questions about its own safety. Meanwhile, researchers were discovering that the Pill was far stronger than necessary.
Gradually, the amount of estrogen
dropped to less than a third of what was in the earliest versions, and progesterone to less than a tenth. The controversy over the Pill died away, but it turned out to be only the first shot in what would become a long-running feud between American women and the traditional medical community.

For generations, women had been American doctors’ best clients and abused guinea pigs. When physicians learned how to use a hypodermic syringe in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the first things they did was to inject opium or morphine into their patients, sometimes on a daily basis, creating legions of addicted housewives.
Surgeons removed reproductive organs
in women who showed signs of promiscuity or masturbation, and castrated more than 100,000 around the turn of the century. And although those abuses were long over by the 1960s, there was still a widespread presumption that a woman’s uterus became useless once she passed childbearing age and should be removed—often along with her ovaries—for minor problems or as a precaution against disease developing in the future. When a doctor discovered a lump in a patient’s breast, it was standard procedure to have the woman sign a form consenting to have the entire breast removed even before the biopsy was performed. (
Susan Ford, whose mother
, Betty, saved many American women’s lives by being open about her mastectomy when she was first lady, noted that in those days, the patient woke up to discover she “either had a Band-Aid or no breast.”)

Doctors, who were overwhelmingly male, had an authoritarian attitude toward all patients in the postwar era, but they saw more women, and they were particularly inclined to treat female patients as children who panicked easily and were better off knowing as little as possible.
When 23-year-old
Barbara Winslow of Seattle found a lump in her breast, she and her husband went to a doctor. He told them that he would do a biopsy and that if it proved malignant, he would immediately perform a complete mastectomy. He then handed a consent form to her husband to sign. When Winslow asked why she was not the one asked to give permission, the doctor said, “Because women are too emotionally and irrationally tied to their breasts.”
Nora Ephron wrote that
it seemed every week brought “a new gynecological atrocity tale. A friend who specifically asks not to be sedated during childbirth is sedated. Another friend who has a simple infection is treated instead for gonorrhea, and develops a serious infection as a side effect of penicillin. Another woman tells of going to see her doctor one month after he has delivered her first child, a deformed baby, born dead. His first question: ‘Why haven’t you been to see me in two years?’ ”

In 1969 a small group of women in Boston decided to get together and share their “feelings of frustration and anger toward… doctors who were condescending, paternalistic, judgmental, and noninformative.” As time went on, the group felt it was on to something worth sharing. The members created a course on women and their bodies that in turn became the basis for
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
a book that talked simply and explicitly about sex, birth control, venereal disease, lesbianism, childbirth, and menopause. Lessons on anatomy and basic biology were interspersed with personal testimony, offering the reader the comforting sense that whatever she was feeling or was worried about had happened to somebody else before. “I will tell you that a book we all had was
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
” said Kathy Hinderhofer, who went to college in the early ’70s. “You had to have that.” Other women started medical self-help projects, some focusing on informal classes that trained students in basics such as breast examinations, and others evolving into full-blown medical clinics. (A few went over the deep end and began urging women to extract their monthly menstrual flow and perform do-it-yourself abortions with a syringe.)
By 1975 nearly two thousand
projects were scattered across the United States.

“I
T IS AS EASY AS BEING THE LOG ITSELF
.”

The sexual revolution was about more than whether women should be able to feel as free as men to have sex before marriage. It was also about whether women—single or married—had as much right to
enjoy
sex. Most postwar manuals on how couples could improve their physical relationship centered on the man. The woman’s role pretty much involved lying there.
The experts did not
generally go as far as the authors of
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex,
an influential postwar diatribe against the nontraditional female that decreed that for a woman, having sex was “not as easy as rolling off a log…. It is easier. It is as easy as being the log itself.” But they almost all seemed to disapprove of too much aggressive activity on her part. And there was a virtual consensus that women should attain satisfaction from conventional penetration.

Many women had little information about what went on in other people’s bedrooms. The popular magazines were vague, and what specifics they did impart were about how to make husbands happy, not how to give wives sexual satisfaction.
In a 1957 article
called “How to Love Your Husband” in
Coronet,
for instance, author Hannah Lees approvingly described an interview with an “unselfish” wife who admitted, in the language of the era, to faking orgasms:

“I have never had that feeling,” she said, “that wild emotion that many other women have. But my husband, he expects it. I love him. So I try to make him happy.” She spread her hands and shrugged, and her face was soft and tender…. Maybe her husband was missing something by not having a wife who could match his strong physical need with hers. But I had an idea it made no difference.

Even Helen Gurley Brown, so eager
to encourage her readers to have affairs, was silent about what a single girl should do if she didn’t enjoy the sex—except to suggest seeing a psychiatrist.
And less than half of married
women and 38 percent of single women said they talked frankly about sex with their friends or female relatives, according to that famous Gallup survey. Even if they did share confidences, what they learned could often be misleading.
Jane Alpert, a high school
student in the early ’60s, was part of a cool bohemian crowd in Queens. Her role model, Beatrice, “the first girl I knew who claimed not to be a virgin,” bragged to Alpert that she had had vaginal orgasms, “which were the best kind.”

While their mothers had not necessarily been reared to expect real physical pleasure from lovemaking, the postwar generation wanted intimacy and partnership in every aspect of marriage. Many women who failed to get much pleasure themselves found solace in creating the illusion of success by writhing, moaning, and simulating orgasm. (Robin Morgan said that when she confessed to her husband that she often faked orgasm with him, she was convinced “I was the only woman in the world sick enough to have done this.”)
It was no wonder
that experts suspected more than half of American women were “frigid.”