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 debut 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
y which helped to create the liberal attitudes that were emerging. As much useful as the Pill was , it had its risks and its opponents. The most opposition to the Pill came from the religious community, especially the Catholic Church. 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. This liberalization of the Church was overturned on July 29, 1968 though, when Pope Paul VI announced that all sexual acts had to include the possibility of producing life in Humanae Vitae. With one document, the Catholic Church swept away all forms of birth control as immoral and completely sinful. Many Christians, Catholic and Protestant, throughout the United States shared in this belief. Those who didn't were persecuted; John Rock, one of the developers of the Pill, was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Seen as one of the biggest faults of the Catholic Church, the popularity of Humanae Vitae declined with Catholics and by 1974, it was ! The main idea behind feminism is the equality of the sexes; a woman's life is of the same worth as a man's. A basic inequality between men and women had always been in the realm of sex. Men were able to have intercourse freely without any real regret or consequence while women were threatened with pregnancy if they partook in unprotected sex. Previously, women had no failsafe form of birth control; the Pill gave women the ability to prevent pregnancy or, if they already had children, to create longer intervals between births and even stop having children altogether. Some feminists argued that this "voluntary childlessness" not only encouraged women to experience a world outside of a maternal role but it also was of an ecological nature as the population had exploded after World War Two8. Feminists also believed that women were subjugated by men and forced into the roles of housewives and mothers; the Pill freed them from having to marry young and be forced into these un! The formation of new movements, most specif
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1406
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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