Extract from Feminism Backwards by Rosita Sweetman

As my darling daughter reminds me progress is a fragile thing. Two steps forward can often be followed by twenty steps back. Just when we thought the battle for legalising contraception here was almost won the campaign to force the 8th Amendment into the Constitution kicked off.

The arrival of ‘the Pill’ in America had of course changed everything. For the first time women, all women, had access to a reliable, affordable, easy to use contraceptive.  Our American sisters got it first but soon it was available in London, and very soon here in Ireland. 

For years the men in government and church hummed and hawed.  Letting us Irish women have ‘the Pill’ would clearly mark the end of Irish civilisation as we knew it. But perhaps, perhaps it could be used on the q.t. as a ‘cycle regulator’? On prescription from your GP? Suddenly Irish women had the highest levels of cycle irregularity in Europe, going to the chemist to get your prescription filled often meant standing awkwardly as the chemist, thunder faced, popped each little pill out of its ever so handily marked packaging into an anonymous brown bottle marked ‘Tonic’.

Crazy days.

Thankfully Irish women have gained more and more control over their sexual and reproductive lives and we are the ones now watching in awe, and grief, as reproductive care is brutally rolled back in Poland and all over the US. Oh yes, Amerikay, from where Second Wave Feminism exploded, has, under the dreadful Mr. Trump, forced the closure of women’s health care centres one after the other. Little old Ireland with its young, educated, liberated generation now leads the way. 

We have a lot to be proud of.

THE PILL

‘The battle for contraception, and the arrival of the contraceptive pill, of course changed everything.

One of the ways, historically, men had gained power over women, grabbed the high ground, was because women became pregnant, and once pregnant had to leave the public sphere to look after the children.  And of course those were the lucky ones – women and girls who got pregnant ‘outside of wedlock’ were universally excoriated, thrown out of their families, out of their villages, often out of life itself. 

Attempts by us humans to enjoy the pleasures of sex with one another, while at the same time thwarting pregnancy go back to the beginnings of time. Potions, lotions, leaves, stones, honey, acacia leaves, acacia gum, lint, pomegranate, date palm, myrrh rue, willow, Artemisia, Silphium, pennyroyal, halves of lemon, crocodile dung, lead, mercury – what haven’t women used to prevent pregnancy, often at great risk to their own health, even of death?

In America in the early 1900s, an extraordinary young woman, Nurse Margaret Sangar, whose own mother (both her parents were Irish Catholics, her father’s family fled from the Famine) endured fourteen pregnancies and died aged forty from tuberculosis, had become horrified at the endless pregnancies and botched back-street abortions endured by the poor and immigrant women she worked among in New York.  As a result, she began a lifelong campaign for effective, reliable and affordable birth control for all women.  She was jailed, vilified and slandered throughout her life – she still is among right-wing groups in America – but Margaret Sangar’s dream of an effective and, crucially, affordable birth control pill came to fruition in 1960 when, thanks to funding from another woman, wealthy philanthropist Katharine McCormick, Sangar’s ‘the Pill’ was licensed by the US Food & Drug Administration and released onto the market. 

Even in Sangar’s time, upper and middle class women had access to private abortion and to whatever the latest form of contraception was – early condoms for the guys or crude diaphragms for the ladies – but the Pill was the first, almost 100 per cent reliable method of birth control available to, and affordable, for all.  It was instrumental in changing everything.

The uptake in America was spectacular.  Women got the message, though in those early days many women had to go to extreme lengths to hide the Pill from the men in their lives, but the advantages of not ‘falling’ pregnant every year, usually outweighed the risks.  Here was something that gave women control over whether or not they got pregnant, something that worked.  It changed ‘sexual politics’ forever. Suddenly they could decide if they wanted to delay marriage, delay starting a family, not start a family at all, not get married at all.  Quite suddenly they were free. 

As the Women’s Movement took hold, as women surged into third-level education, the workforce, the professions, took lovers, bought bikinis, decided there was more to life – a lot more – than settling down in a house in the ’burbs, with the gadgets, it was clear the Pill had helped to change everything.  For women.  And for men. The American sisters made sure it did.’