Opinion Birth of the pill
The synthesis of a compound in 1951 would change the lives of women across the world.
Carl Djerassi, the man who conquered birth, is dead. In Mexico City on October 15, 1951, Djerassi and his team were the first to synthesise a progestin called norethindrone, which would be used to make oral contraceptives. Many will remember him as the “father of the pill”, though Djerassi himself preferred to think he “played a maternal role in the birth of the pill”. His most famous invention would toss up gender roles in a similar fashion. For the “corralling of carbon atoms into hitherto unknown and more useful ways”, as Djerassi described it, would have consequences far beyond the laboratory.
The pill was developed in the first decade of the baby boom, the age of circle skirts and the new wave of American conservatism. The idea that a woman with sexual desires was not necessarily a depraved creature had found acceptance with the rise of Freudianism in the 1920s, but doctors and psychologists still advised women to explore these desires within the bounds of marriage. With the advent of the pill, sex changed. It helped reject older ideas about “sex for procreation” and made it all right for sex to be about pleasure. It gave women autonomy over their bodies. The sexual revolution of the 1960s took shape as thousands of single women went to drug stores to buy the pill. These women now had the freedom to put off motherhood and marriage, pursue degrees and careers. Women joined the workforce and the ideal of the American nuclear family, with the man as the provider and the wife in the kitchen, was banished.
The corralling of carbon atoms ended up changing the terms on which men and women engaged with each other, reconfigured social relations, helped support a country’s economy and had implications for population control. The pill, one might say, was the mother of all ideas.
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