KS3 / GCSE History: Development of the contraceptive pill

In the first half of the twentieth century, in America, women fought to be recognised as equal to men and for the freedom to control their own lives.

They’d won the vote in 1920 and now a new form of politics had arrived: sexual politics.

Margaret Sanger was a tiny red-headed radical from the back streets. Her name isn’t very well known but she did more to shape today’s world than most politicians.

In the early twentieth century, Manhattan was a divided island. Uptown was swinging, brash and booming, the most fashionable place on the planet.

Downtown was very different, a place of old-fashioned poverty.

In the overcrowded tenement blocks teeming with new immigrants, women were desperate to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

These women were caught in a dilemma: either dangerous self-induced abortions or the back street abortionist who could be just as dangerous.

Margaret Sanger was a nurse. She saw the worst and she thought all women had the right to safe contraception, birth control.

SANGER:
You’re going to get through this.

Andrew:
“I shuddered with horror”, said Margaret Sanger. “I resolved to do something to change the destiny of these mothers whose miseries were as vast as the sky."

But contraceptives were taboo, unacceptable to most Americans. Those who sold them were condemned as purveyors of vice and sin, likely to corrupt society.

In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened America’s first birth control clinic here in a poor district of Brooklyn. On the opening day, more than a hundred women queued up for help and advice.

WOMAN [whispering]:
Seventeen.

SANGER:
I haven’t seen you before. What’s your name?

Andrew:
But the pamphlets she was giving out were classed as obscene literature.

POLICEWOMAN:
Get out of here now!
You’re under arrest…

SANGER:No you listen to me, get these men out of here. Get off of me. Will you get them off of me?

Andrew:
Sanger was charged under America’s very strong anti-obscenity laws. The clinic was shut down…

So much for women’s rights.

But private individuals, if they had enough guts and could lay hands on some money, could fight back. Contraceptives couldn’t be imported into America but Margaret Sanger had a friend, a friend who could help, a friend with a picture-book chateau by Lake Geneva.

This was the summer home of a rich American heiress, Katharine McCormick. She was a glamorous society lady who liked the latest fashions but she was also a rarity. She’d studied biology at university and campaigned for votes for women.

Once American women had the vote, like their Scandinavian and British sisters, she was looking for a new cause and she alighted on birth control which is why an unlikely friendship was formed between the heiress and the agitator.

In Europe, contraceptives were easy to get hold of. Katharine McCormick went around buying up posh frocks and then had hundreds of diaphragms sewn into the hems, before boldly smuggling the clothing in trunks back to New York where Sanger had opened a new clinic which flourished.

This was a great victory for private enterprise politics, and the campaigner and wealthy rebel kept in touch.

Margaret Sanger always wanted an easier-to-use contraceptive, a fail-safe one, and when decades on scientists thought this might be possible, she turned again to Katharine McCormick who bankrolled the research. It had been a long road from those New York tenement blocks but in 1960, the Pill went on the market. It revolutionised birth control for women.

Half a century on, the Pill has become the contraceptive of choice for way over a hundred million women all around the world.

Its social impact has been huge. It’s allowed women to make choices about education and their careers, to delay having children or to have no children at all. Along with votes for women, it has been one of the biggest social changes of the twentieth century.

Indeed, many women would say the biggest change of all.