The Pill: A Prescription for Equality, Part 2

Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History
by David Allyn

(Page 2 of 3)

Although executives at Searle were well aware that the pill had many potentially dangerous side effects (studies suggested links to nausea, headaches, dizziness, heart problems, and cancer), they marketed the new drug aggressively. An in-house newsletter told Searle salesmen to "weed out all the negative points and convince doctors to get patients started on Enovid TODAY ...We are making each selected call with one objective: Enovid Prescriptions."

No matter what the motives of pharmaceutical executives may have been, the pill was a major breakthrough in women's emancipation. Women were finally free to control their own reproductive cycles. Not surprisingly, the pill was immediately popular. By 1962, an estimated 1,187,000 women were using it. It took journalists until 1965 to really discover the pill, but once they did, they endorsed it wholeheartedly. As Redbook magazine explained, "Since the pill can be taken any time of day, and since it does not involve contact with the genitals, and since it is taken on a regular schedule whether one plans immediately to make love or not, it can be used without full awareness that one is preparing oneself for intercourse." According to Time, the pill was "a miraculous tablet." Gloria Steinem, who switched from the diaphragm to the pill in the early sixties, wrote a glowing tribute to oral contraceptives in the pages of Esquire. "For one thing, it is more aesthetic than mechanical devices and, because it works chemically to prevent ovulation, it can be taken at a time completely removed from intercourse." The pill's champions insisted that it was entirely safe and, if used properly, 100 percent effective.

American women had been using various forms of birth control for centuries, but once the pill was invented, a kind of cultural amnesia took hold. Other forms of birth control were suddenly considered primitive, even barbaric. One gynecologist claimed, "All women find the diaphragm awkward, or even unpleasant.... The pill is easier, less anxiety-producing...by a factor of thousands." There was something delightfully modern and pragmatic about the pill, which may have gotten its nickname from a sentence in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited (1958). A woman on the pill could theoretically have worry-free sex any time, any place. The pill promised to erase fear and anxiety, to make sex simple and contraception discreet. The only real reservation anyone expressed about the pill in the midsixties was that it might make women more independent and consequently make men feel more insecure.

When John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, was sworn into office in January 1961, the aging Margaret Sanger predicted a new era of sexual repression. A Catholic president, Sanger felt, was sure to oppose birth control. Sanger, of course, was wrong about Kennedy: Despite his religious upbringing, he believed strongly in the separation of church and state. In fact, as a result of the Cold War, most politicians in Washington, fearing a link between overpopulation and socialism, strongly supported anything that would check the population explosion in the Third World. By the early sixties, former president Dwight Eisenhower was honorary president of Planned Parenthood and a key advocate of federal support for foreign birth control programs. In 1963, Congress allocated $80,000 for population control research. Even if Cold War politicians were operating on questionable assumptions, the Kennedy era witnessed a newly pragmatic approach to family planning.

But it was still illegal for anyone other than doctors to import birth control into the United States. On October 15, 1962, Elly Foote arrived at New York's Idlewild (now JFK) International Airport from Sweden. When she passed through customs, agents searched through her purse and seized her diaphragm. They made her sign a statement granting them permission to destroy it.

Birth control itself was also still illegal in many states in the 1960s. This infuriated William R. Baird, a man who would devote his life to abolishing laws against birth control and abortion. Born in 1932, one of six children in a poor Brooklyn family, Baird was raised to believe it was crucial never to have sex before marriage. When he married in 1953, both he and his wife were sexually inexperienced. After the Korean War, Baird took a job with a pharmaceutical company, which happened to be in the business of manufacturing contraceptive foam. As clinical director, Baird visited a hospital in Harlem in 1963. There he heard the screams of a woman dying from a self-induced, coat-hanger abortion. "She was covered in blood, and she died in my arms." When Baird found out that contraception was illegal in New York, he went to Planned Parenthood to offer his services, but he was snubbed by organization officials. Accepting the role of lone crusader, Baird began going from town to town violating laws against the display of contraceptives. He used a van, which he decorated on the inside like a living room, to bring birth control to poor communities.

I bought an old UPS van, painted it white, put in a fake fireplace and painted fake wood walls and put up drapes. I wanted to create an atmosphere that for twenty minutes you were in Bill Baird's home and could talk about anything you wanted to. That was my shock. I learned about the incredible ignorance of Americans. A woman would come to me and tell me that she used Lysol for douching. To induce abortion, poor people would often use Kirkman soap, which they would chop into little pieces, add water, and introduce into the uterus. They didn't realize that the body could absorb fat from the soap and they could die of a fat embolism. Or they would use water and salt, which they would insert up into the uterus, but what they didn't know was that it could also cause an air embolism. Women would tell me about how they had thrown themselves down the stairs to cause an abortion. Men would show me how they punched their girlfriends and wives in the abdominal area to terminate the pregnancy.

Almost everywhere Baird went, he was arrested. He was imprisoned eight times in five states. A magazine for African-Americans ran a feature story on Baird and put his phone number on the cover so that women could contact him to find out where to obtain an abortion. Baird was fired from his job at the pharmaceutical company. "The man who had hired me said, ?If you keep on teaching birth control in that van you're going to get fired.' I said, ?Joe, you hired me for my skills and you don't own me. If I want to go bowling after work or go to a movie or teach birth control, it is none of your business.' " Baird took odd jobs and received financial assistance from his friends Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner, and he kept on providing birth control to the poor. In 1964, he founded a clinic on Main Street in Hempstead, Long Island, then a predominantly poor, black community.

In the spring of 1965, Baird was operating his van in Nassau County, Republican country. "The police literally pulled me out of the van and handcuffed me, charging me with indecent exposure of obscene objects.... Within a few months of my arrest, the state of New York changed the law. Nevertheless, the right-wing district attorney who was running for reelection, William Kahn, announced he would prosecute me anyway. The day after he was reelected Kahn dropped the charges. He was later indicted for double-billing Nassau County."

The following year, Marcus Dailey, the commissioner of welfare in Freehold, New Jersey, announced that he was going to reduce welfare costs by putting unwed mothers in jail. His plan was to charge the women under the state's fornication statute. In response, Baird brought his van to Freehold. He was quickly arrested and sentenced to prison for twenty days.

By 1965 conflict over sexual morality was leading the nation to the brink of a cultural crisis. How could the country that had produced Sex and the Single Girl, topless dancing, breast implants, Playboy, and the pill still have laws against contraception? The Constitution was vague on matters of sexual morality. The Bill of Rights clearly favored personal privacy and individual autonomy, but nowhere mentioned sexual behavior specifically. If laws against contraception were challenged, the nine justices of the Supreme Court would have to choose between a future ruled by Catholic pro-natalist forces or by Planned Parenthood and its liberal Protestant allies.

The leaders of Planned Parenthood were determined to win this war. They realized, however, that a man like William Baird was too much of a lighting rod for controversy to win support from the courts. They needed a female spokesperson, who would remind judges of their own wives and grandmothers, and preferably a Catholic. In Connecticut, the state with the strictest anti?birth control laws in the nation, Planned Parenthood activists found a friend in Estelle Griswold, a Roman Catholic born in 1900. Tall, graceful, and fluent in French, Griswold was the model of a New England matron. She had never even seen a diaphragm when she was asked to take over Connecticut's Planned Parenthood League. At first Griswold had no interest in the job ("It just left me cold," she later recalled), but she soon warmed to the challenge of overturning Connecticut's long-standing anti-contraception statute.

Copyright © 2000 by David Allyn

About the Author

David Allyn has a Ph.D. from Harvard and has taught history at Princeton University. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the New York Daily News, and the Journal of American Studies. He has appeared on CNN and MSNBC and has lectured on the sexual revolution at conferences and colleges across the country. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, with his wife and daughter.