http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jun/06/rachel-cooke-fifty-years-the-pill-oral-contraceptive

Fifty years of the pillSince it was introduced in 1960, the pill has
been blamed for promiscuity, hideous side-effects and even destroying
marriage. But the world's most popular oral contraceptive has also
liberated millions of women. Is it time we showed our gratitude?

Rachel Cooke The Observer, Sunday 6 June 2010

Introduced in 1960, the world's most popular oral contraceptive is now
taken for granted.
Last year, Virago republished Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel The Group,
with a new introduction by the author of Sex and the City, Candace
Bushnell. The Group is a novel which some of my dearest friends
consider to be a) seminal and b) as racy, in its way, as Peyton Place,
so I went out and bought the new edition, and read it over the course
of a lazy weekend. Did I like it? Oh yes. The story of eight female
graduates choosing careers and husbands (though not necessarily in
that order) in 1930s New York, it is wonderfully funny, savage and
piercing, with a gossipy kind of a plot that pulls you along rather in
the manner of Carrie Bradshaw on the trail of a fine pair of spike
heels. The travails of its characters – the wife who must shop for
dinner before work in order that she can get straight to the stove
when she comes home – still feel marvellously modern. But something
else struck me about it, too: the detailed and intimate way in which
it deals with the problem of contraception. For all the undoubted
punch of her writing, there are moments down at the family planning
clinic when McCarthy seems to be writing an encouraging manual as much
as a novel.

Let us agree, for a moment, that there is such a thing as the women's
novel. In women's novels of the late 20th and early 21st century, we
see this aspect of women's lives only rarely. Of course characters
still fall in love, and they have sex, plenty of it sometimes. But if
they menstruate, no one ever mentions it; and if they visit a family
planning clinic, they do it off the page, well out of sight of the
gentle reader. In The Group, however, biology, and how to pull a fast
one on it, are centre stage. Early on in the novel, one of the group,
Dottie, goes to bed with a man to whom she is not married, Dick. She
is a virgin – "she had never seen that part of a man, except in
statuary and once, at the age of six, when she had interrupted Daddy
in his bath" – and it shows. Too shy to mention contraception, Dick,
more experienced, employs the oldest method of all, "coitus
interruptus… a horrid nuisance". Afterwards, as Dottie is preparing to
leave, he tells her to get herself a "pessary" (this is American for a
diaphragm). "When you get yourself fixed up, you can bring your things
here and I'll keep them for you," he says, a reference to the fact
that in 1930s America, as in 1930s Britain, diaphragms were not the
kind of thing unmarried women left lying around in their top drawers,
where, depending on their circumstances, their staff, mother or
girlfriends might find them.

Dottie, then, goes to a clinic to pick up her "new device", one
discovered by the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger in Holland and
imported into the US for the first time. There follows a long and
detailed account of the fitting of the diaphragm. Dottie is gung ho
about getting herself "fixed up", but not so gung ho as to be entirely
unruffled by the experience of squatting girdleless on a surgery floor
in front of a complete stranger, and there is an embarrassing moment
when, observed by both doctor and nurse, the diaphragm, covered in
jelly, flies out of her hand, crossing the room like a tiny bat.
Afterwards, nervously thrilled at the step she has taken, Dottie tries
to call Dick. He isn't home. She leaves a message, telling him that
she is waiting for him in Washington Square. But he doesn't come.
Eventually, as dusk falls, Dottie discreetly places her precious
packages beneath the bench on which she has spent her afternoon, and
heads for Fifth Avenue and a taxi.

McCarthy's novel was published three years after the pill was approved
by the US authorities in 1960, but several years before it was widely
available (well into the 1970s, women in Britain and America were
still pretending to be married in order to get a prescription; some
used to pass around the same battered wedding ring in the doctor's
waiting room). Its explicit descriptions, for the day, of
jelly-covered discs of rubber thus foreshadow the coming openness at
the same time as they reflect the widespread fear, ignorance and shame
which many women, in 1963, still felt when it came to sex. From the
late 1950s until the mid-70s, there were lots of novels like this,
outwardly controversial and racy but also heavy with the misery and
conflict that came with sex before the advent of the pill. Only then,
in fiction as in the world, the anxiety, the unappetising "equipment"
seemed suddenly to disappear. Now, 21st-century women's novels deal
with the IVF clinic, not contraception.

Fifty years after its birth, we take the pill entirely for granted; we
think about what it erased forever not at all. For sure, it is
sometimes the subject of newspaper stories. But less often than of
old, and only when it has been dubiously linked to yet another health
scare. (From time to time, of course, the odd relic will bemoan its
effect on our morals, usually at the behest of the Daily Mail. Last
month it was the turn of Raquel Welch on CNN. The pill has destroyed
marriage, she said: "Seriously, folks, if an ageing sex symbol like me
starts waving the red flag of caution over how low moral standards
have plummeted, you know it's gotta be pretty bad.") We do not talk
about it; we do not celebrate it. In the 20-24 age group, two-thirds
of British women take it every morning, as unthinkingly as they dial
their boyfriends on their mobile phones. It is just another
convenience, and what their grandmothers and great-grandmothers went
through is straight out of the history books.

"Young women don't realise what hell it was [before the arrival of the
pill]," says the fashion designer Mary Quant. "The perpetual anxiety.
It was a real revolution." Was she an early adopter? "Oh yes, it was
quite wonderful. Of course it was hellishly difficult to get hold of
at first. There was a lot of pretending one was married when one went
to the doctor, and a minor disadvantage was that the early pills made
one put on a couple of pounds. But that was nothing! Who cared? The
other forms of contraception were so hellish." She squeals at the
memory. "I remember going to a doctor in Chelsea for a Dutch cap.
'It's quite easy,' she said. 'When you dress for dinner, just pop this
in!'"

The novelist Margaret Drabble, whose 1967 novel Jerusalem the Golden
also features a diaphragm scene, agrees that the pill changed
everything; that the revolution associated with its arrival has not
been mythologised down the years. "The other methods were quite
remarkably unreliable," Drabble recalls, "and fairly repulsive, and
the people who worked in the clinics fitting them were rather
unfriendly and punitive. I remember going to be fitted for a cap, and
I had a child in a pushchair, and the woman asked me why on earth I
was there. By the time the pill was available I already had three
children; I think I would have had a child a year if I hadn't started
taking it. So, yes, it made a very considerable difference to one's
life. You were able to make a choice, you were able to look after
yourself, and I was pleased to do so.

Drabble says her generation had been afraid of getting pregnant.
"People were very afraid of abortion; it threatened you. The pill also
meant people were able to keep the integrity of the family. Of course
people had affairs before the pill, but with more anxiety, and there
were mixed children, and some told, and some didn't tell. Afterwards
that was no longer the case."

In 1960, shame was still a powerful force, pill or no pill. In the
same year, Lynne Reid Banks published her first novel, The L-Shaped
Room. Considered shocking at the time, it tells the story of a failed
actress, Jane Graham, who, having fallen pregnant and been turned out
of the family home by her disgusted father, goes to live in a dingy,
bug-ridden bedsit at the top of a squalid boarding house in Fulham.
"When I wrote it I had never been pregnant," says Reid Banks. "I based
the story on a girl who had the flat next to mine. But my mother was
so worried about my reputation that she begged me to publish under an
assumed name. 'Everyone will think it's you,' she said. I laughed
merrily. But she was right."

Reid Banks never took the pill. By the time it was available she was
married and busy having a family. "However, about the fear of unwanted
pregnancy I can talk. This fear in itself was quite an effective
contraception, even for our boyfriends, who, if they were the right
sort, were as scared as we were of getting us into trouble. It meant
that 'going all the way' was something many of us only did when either
things got out of control, or in the course of what was called 'the
search' – ie, affairs were morally justified when you thought he might
be 'the one' or could deceive yourself into thinking so. We used to
'pet' like mad: by the hour, and very inventively, and inevitably
getting ourselves into a fine old state. I followed the
nothing-below-the-waist rule most of the time." What was that like?
"It was pretty stressful, and probably very bad for us."