[2266] in peace2
"the pill": the documentary | the econ papers | the mccormick
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (stephanie wei Wang)
Sun Feb 23 18:35:49 2003
Message-Id: <200302232335.SAA20561@hayden-6.mit.edu>
To: peace-announce@MIT.EDU, peace-women@MIT.EDU, sos-members@MIT.EDU,
v-day-list@MIT.EDU
cc: pro-choice@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 18:35:32 -0500
From: stephanie wei Wang <sweiwang@MIT.EDU>
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the documentary
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Monday, Feb 24th
9 PM on PBS
watch it with MIT pro-choice in 1-246
synopsis at end of email
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the econ papers
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(well, "the economist" did name "the pill" as "the greatest science and
technology advance in the twentieth century.")
professors claudia goldin and lawrence katz at harvard did a series of
papers on the importance of the pill
"The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women's Career and Marriage
Decisions"
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, revised version of NBER Working Paper
no. 7527, Journal of Political Economy, (forthcoming August 2002).
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/~goldin/papers/pillpaper.pdf
"Career and Marriage in the Age of the Pill"
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz American Economic Review, Papers &
Proceedings (May 2000)
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/~goldin/papers/gkp&p.pdf
"On the Pill: Changing the Course of Women's Education"
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz Milken Institute Review vol. 3
(2nd Quarter 2001), pp. 12-21
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/~goldin/papers/milken.pdf
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the mccormick
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yes, our very own katherine dexter mccormick `04, as many of you know, was
instrumental in the development of "the pill."
http://www.global-campaign.org/m-story.htm
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synopsis
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AMERICAN EXPERIENCE "The Pill"
On May 11, 1960, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of a contraceptive pill. In just five years, six million American women had made it part of their daily lives. It allowed women to pursue careers as never before, fueled the feminist movement and encouraged more open attitudes towards sex. The Pill, as it came to be known, would arguably have a greater impact on American culture than any other drug in the nation's history.
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE The Pill, narrated by Blair Brown, explores the story behind the development of the birth control pill. The one-hour program airs on PBS Monday, February 24, 2003 (check local listings).
As recently as the 1950s, 30 states enforced laws that prohibited or restricted the sale of contraceptive devices. Without an effective means of controlling their fertility, young women faced the prospect of three decades of child-bearing. Alexander Sanger, grandson of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, describes the predicament: "My grandmother grew out of a world where her mother was pregnant 18 times, had 11 children, seven miscarriages and was dead at age 49."
Although Sanger, 71, had managed to broaden access to diaphragms and condoms, women still didn't have a foolproof way of preventing pregnancies. She dreamed of developing a simple pill and teamed up with heiress Katharine McCormick, then 78 years old, to champion the cause. In 1953, Sanger and McCormick engaged a brilliant but discredited biologist, Gregory Pincus, to do the research, with McCormick penning a check for $40,000 to get the work started. Over the course of the project, she would contribute millions of dollars. After enlisting a respected gynecologist, John Rock, to do the field studies, Pincus persuaded the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle to manufacture the Pill.
The Pill features personal accounts from the first generation of women to have access to the Pill. For the very first time, recalls Loretta McLaughlin, women would be set free to enjoy sex, without the fear of pregnancy hanging over their head. They did not have to get up in the dark of night, as one woman said, and walk across ice-cold linoleum in bare feet to go into the bathroom and get the diaphragm.
"For the first time in my life, I could think about sex just as sex and not as a potentially life-destroying event," says Anita Fream.
The strongest voice against the Pill came from the Vatican. Rock, himself a devout Roman Catholic, launched a vigorous public relations campaign to persuade the church that the Pill mimicked a woman's natural process and did not violate the Church's teachings against birth control. When he failed, he was devastated.
In the initial drug trials, Rock and Pincus dismissed complaints of nausea, dizziness, headaches, stomach pain and vomiting. But after the Pill's release, women began to report similar symptoms. When they sought help from their gynecologists, they found few answers. The motto was, "Don't worry your pretty little head about it," says Barbara Seamans. In fact, the early high-dose pills resulted in serious, sometimes fatal, reactions in a small percentage of women, and led to dramatic, contentious hearings on Capitol Hill.
Andrea Tone, author of Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, sums it up: "Eighty percent of all American women born since 1945 have taken the Pill. We cannot understand modern women's history without thinking about what the Pill did for women and also what the Pill did to women."
