America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation by Elaine Tyler May Page A

Rebecca L looked back forty years to her college days and recalled, “I chose to have intercourse for the first time my junior year of college. It was 1968 and I was twenty-one. I began dating in junior high and was involved in kissing, making out etc. I grew up with parents who thought that dating was very important, but also emphasized the importance of virginity at all costs. I was immensely confused about where to draw lines and how to draw lines, about good girls and bad girls. This was a remark- ably frequent conversation topic with both my mother and my father through high school and college, at their initiation.” As with many of her peers, Rebecca’s ideas began to change, but her parents’ did not, which meant that even if she had no qualms about her sexual behavior she faced the prospect of her family’s disapproval. “By 1968 I was very conscious of a change in sexual mores and I wanted to get on with it. I began to think that what was acceptable or not acceptable for a ‘good girl’ was arbitrary. My junior year I became involved with a man a few years older than me and we very quickly decided to get mar- ried. I don’t remember much discussion about having sex or not. I was ready. I don’t remember anything about birth con- trol and I don’t remember this sexual relationship being very

    pleasurable.” The relationship did not end in marriage, but it left Rebecca with a venereal disease. Living at home for the summer, she saw her family doctor for medication, which her mother discovered. “I had a horrific confrontation with my mother who asked me if I was a virgin and I said ‘I’m not and it was beautiful,’ which it wasn’t.”
    Soon, Rebecca was sexually involved with another man, whom she would later marry. Although the pill was available, she did not use it. “I very actively chose to be sexual, but I really was not quite sure how to go about getting birth control. It was not that I was unwilling to see myself as sexually active, or that I didn’t want to acknowledge my interest in sex. I was just not enough in charge of my life, and I had the enormous struggle with my parents’ huge disapproval and shame. On the one hand I really rejected it. On the other hand, I had internalized it.”
    Rebecca ended up pregnant, and had an abortion. “I liter- ally never took a risk with birth control again in my life.” Today Rebecca and her husband are still married, the parents of two young women. She told them her history and encour- aged them to use birth control as soon as they became sexually active. Many women of Rebecca’s generation did not want their children to suffer the shame, danger, and conflict they ex- perienced when they were young. 32
    Eleanor S also became sexually active in college. She too planned to have sex but did not use birth control. As a college senior in 1969, tired of the virginity obsession that had been drilled into her by her parents, she was determined to have sex with the next man she dated. “I decided to have sex before I knew who the guy would be. So when I started dating Gordon,

    we began having sex. . . . No fireworks, that’s for sure. But as I look back on it, I was surprisingly irresponsible, thinking that I wouldn’t get pregnant because of the time it was in my cycle. I knew the rhythm method didn’t work, but that was all I used.” Like Rebecca’s first sexual relationship, Eleanor’s didn’t last long. Soon after breaking up with Gordon she began dat- ing Donald, the man she would eventually marry. “At that point I knew enough to get reliable birth control, and I wanted to go on the pill.” But she was reluctant to ask her family doc- tor for fear of his disapproval, and didn’t know where else to turn. “I was very lucky that I didn’t get pregnant.” 33
    Rebecca and Eleanor were both children of liberal parents (although they were clearly not very liberal about unmarried sex). They were both feminists. They made the decision to en-