Birth Control and Revolution
Nineteen hundred and sixty was the year that ushered in a decade of great historical change; during this decade, man walked on the moon, watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and waited for nuclear war. As a decade that saw the Cuban Missile Crisis, the creation of the Berlin Wall and the United States entering the Vietnam War, it is characterized as a decade of political crisis, social upheaval and nearly continuous warfare. But in addition to all this turmoil, the Sixties should also be remembered for two other very important things: women and sex. The Sexual Revolution was borne in this decade along with the modern feminist movement and while these two movements were influenced by a multitude of other movements, people and events, nothing contributed to them more than the creation of the birth control pill. The single greatest achievement of the 1960s was not the first kidney transplant, the first Soviet in space or even the début of Monty Python’s Flying Circus; !it was the regulation of the female reproductive system. The Sexual Revolution is generally considered a liberalizing of social morality beginning in the late 1950s and reaching its peak during the next fifteen years. During previous decades, the United . . .
The birth control pill gave women the ability to follow this manual. John Rock, an obstetrician-gynecologist, to research and develop such a contraceptive based on the use of hormones to control fertility and ovulation. As well, a massive international cultural exchange between Italy, France, Britain and the United States occurred as music, fashion, film and television from each country entered the others at an unprecedented rate. No longer was a woman chained to her reproductive system and no longer would she fall into t! he “trap of suburbia. Sex and the Single Girl described single life as a wonderful adventure and gave single women the instructions to lead a fulfilling life by themselves and to prolong it as long as possible. Due to the high levels of progesterone in early versions of the Pill, women suffered from strokes, thromboembolism, and arterial dysfunction as well as being at greater risk for liver tumors, gall bladder disease, diabetes, heart attack and other cancers. ” The use of the Pill helped women to postpone their first marriage and by separating the sex act from contraception, a single female had as much freedom as the bachelors in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy world did. Another book targeted at single women, Sex and the Single Girl, agreed with The Feminine Mystique: being a housewife was all there was to life so a single girl should avoid marriage as long as possible. While it cannot solely be entirely credited for either revolution, the Pill certainly did lay the foundation for both and is arguably the most influential and important development of this decade. Gregory Pincus, a biochemist, and Dr. Also, the high levels of synthetic estrogen in the Pill led to similar problems. Under Pope John XXIII, a group of theological scholars voted to change the teachings that surrounded birth control of the Catholic Church by a vote of 60 to 413. Also, there were few contraceptive options for women, none of which were particularly reliable. The levels of the hormones were adjusted several times to minimize the risk of blood clotting, which was the biggest fear of women and the pill became safer to use with fewer deaths from Pill related clotting each year.
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