The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (26 page)

Earlier in his career, Rock had been too busy delivering babies to explore the mysteries of human reproduction. Only after his first heart attack did he begin to reduce his patient load and spend more time on research. Initially there had been little money for research. Patients paid the bills. Now, as one of the top figures in his field working at one of the top universities in the world, grant money flowed from drug companies, foundations, and the federal government. Fertility clinics, once rare, were cropping up around the country as women in the 1950s tried to join the postwar rush to get married and pregnant. But even the doctors running the clinics did not fully understand their field because it was so new, and they often turned to Rock for advice. Most of his time was still dedicated to helping infertile couples try to have children, but the work was difficult. Trained as a surgeon, Rock tried delicate operations to repair fallopian tubes, but the results were rarely successful. When a man’s low sperm count was responsible for the infertility, Rock tried freezing the sperm and weeding out the sluggish ones. He tried spinning semen in a centrifuge to boost its concentration. He told men to eat more lettuce for vitamin E and to lose weight because lean animals tended to be more fertile than heavy ones. He prescribed large doses of testosterone, thinking that it might work the way progesterone did on women—shutting down their reproductive systems and giving them a temporary rest. He tried everything he could think of, but most of the work had little effect. By the 1950s, he admitted to colleagues that he and his fellow researchers knew “
pitifully little that was of practical value
.”

On May 6, 1954, Rock was the featured speaker at Planned Parenthood’s annual luncheon in New York City. Before the event, Planned Parenthood officials expressed concern: What would the press say if they found out that their
keynote speaker was Catholic
? Rock had this response: “Just tell anybody who asks the point in question that I am a Roman Catholic, and then you might add ‘and what of it.’ Being one does not blind one to the paramount
importance of the world population increase
.”

In his speech, Rock managed to be both charming and challenging. He began:

I take it you are here today because you are fascinated by the subject of babies, or because you ought to be; and I am given the privilege of addressing you because I know something about the business of having babies—or because I ought to. This most ancient of human endeavors has allured me as a gynecologist for thirty years, and I must confess, under other guise, for nigh on fifty.

He went on to say that the audience was probably wondering whether he was for or against having babies. Rock said he was for it, strongly—and he was not only in favor of babies but also in favor of sex. The desire for sex—“this impulse that forces Adam to pre-
sent, and Eve to receive”—was something humans should cherish, not repress. In other mammals, the sex drive lives only in the “lower nervous centers,” he explained, but in humans it passes upward from the groin to the base of the forebrain, where the urge for sex becomes “inextricably blended” with something we call love. Without this instinct for love, he said, man would be no more than beast. He asked: “Why, if sex is so natural . . . should any married person want or be required to restrict either its exercise or its output? The gruesome answer is inescapable. . . . If fertility is uncontrolled, normal expression of the sex instinct, even with the monogamous family that evolved for this very purpose, results in the fusion of more spermatozoa and eggs than most parents can safely culture, or Earth care for.”

The solution, he said, was not for men and women to stop having sex. That impulse was too strong to be denied. And even if married couples did try to suppress their urges, without sex love would grow cold. But there was a way to help married couples continue to enjoy sex without having more babies than they desired. The solution, he said, was to find “a contraceptive as effective as continence but without its inherent disadvantages.”

Such a contraceptive would not be discovered by accident. It would require investment, he said. In 1953, the federal government spent thirty million dollars on efforts to control hoof-and-mouth disease, Rock told his audience. It spent another two billion dollars on nuclear weapons research. He concluded: “If we could muster just one-thousandth of this amount to finance the study of human reproduction, we would assuredly obtain the greatest aid ever discovered to the happiness and security of individual families—indeed of mankind. This would avert Man’s self-destruction by starvation and war. If it can be discovered soon, the H-bomb need never fall.

“The urgency is on us: ample talent is available. Let us mobilize it with dollars and devotion.”

Rock might have supposed that he was preaching to the choir. If anyone could have been expected to join his call to action, it was officials and donors of Planned Parenthood. Certainly, the organization had the ability to produce two million dollars in funding.

But Planned Parenthood was no longer the radical organization it had been in its earliest years. Liberalism was out of fashion in the 1950s. The economic depression was over and American wages were rising, but poor and working-class families were making little progress. Labor unions were losing power, and leftists were coming under attack. The radical feminism of Margaret Sanger not only went out of style, it also became dangerous. When Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an investigation into the communists infiltrating American society, hysteria gripped the nation. Leaders of the birth-control movement, like so many other liberal activists in the 1950s, toned down their voices. Women of the 1950s were still expected to serve their men, and if a marriage failed, it was almost always the wife’s fault. If a husband drank too much or carried on affairs, he was probably seeking refuge from an unpleasant home. If a woman failed to make her man happy, she wasn’t trying hard enough. “
Two big steps that women must take
are to help their husbands decide where they are going and use their pretty heads to help them get there,” Mrs. Dale Carnegie, wife of the best-selling self-help writer, wrote in
Better Homes and Gardens
in 1955. “Let’s face it, girls. That wonderful guy in your house—and in mine—is building your house, your happiness and the opportunities that will come to your children.”

But there were signs in the 1950s that women were ready to rebel against sexual and marital norms. In 1954, readers responded with outrage when movie star Marlene Dietrich wrote in
Ladies’ Home Journal
that women needed to subordinate themselves to men if they wanted to be loved. “To be a complete woman,” Dietrich said, “you need a master.” She went on to say that women should
wash the dishes and emerge “utterly desirable.”
One woman shot back: “Out here where I live, reasonably intelligent [married couples] . . .
learn to live and work together
.”

According to the Kinsey report, 85 percent of all white men had had premarital sex, which meant, of course, that a roughly equal number of women were doing the same. Women were at least beginning to talk among themselves about opportunities beyond housewifery. Some of them were also discussing their frustrations with psychoanalysts, who adapted the work of Freud to suggest that sexual repression could damage a person’s mental health. Divorce rates were creeping up. And women were being urged as never before to become active in their communities. In the 1930s, when
Ladies’ Home Journal
urged women to help end the Depression, it suggested they do so by shopping more. By the 1950s, the
Journal
was suggesting they consider running for local office and working
behind the scenes on political campaigns
.

Even so, there was no young version of Margaret Sanger on the American scene to lead the revolution. No one yet dared declare that motherhood ought to be voluntary, that women had as much right to sexual pleasure as men, that marriage was not necessarily meant to be dominated by the husband, or that women were as entitled to a college education and good jobs as men were.

In 1949,
Ladies’ Home Journal
ran a feature on the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, along with a photo of her recently remodeled kitchen. “Now I expect to hear no more about the housework’s being done,” the magazine said. “For if one of the greatest poets of our day, and any day, can find beauty in simple household tasks, this is the
end of the old controversy
.” But women weren’t buying it, at least not all of them. In the mid-1950s, a housewife turned freelance writer named Betty Friedan began researching a book on a generation of women that had given up their dreams of emancipation for the security of big suburban homes with shiny modern appliances. Friedan claimed that male editors at magazines were out to convince women that housework provided all the self-expression and independence they needed. With her book, which she would call
The Feminine Mystique
, Friedan intended to show women another way
.

In the first part of the decade, television shows made fathers the bosses. Only the men controlled the family’s money and made the important decisions. But in 1955,
The Honeymooners
appeared on the air. Alice Kramden put her hands on her hips and told her husband Ralph that he was supposed to pay his lodge dues out of his allowance and she wasn’t going to give him another dime until he learned to take better care of his money. In another episode, Alice informed her husband she was getting a job and
he
would have to start doing the housework.

Rebellion was brewing, and sex and gender were at the center of it.

“
Sex is something I really don’t understand
too hot,” said Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s novel,
The Catcher in the Rye
, published in 1951
.
“You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away.” On July 5, 1954, less than two months after Rock’s address to Planned Parenthood, Elvis Presley recorded his first single, “That’s All Right.” The song had a throbbing beat. As he sang, Presley straddled his microphone stand and gyrated his hips in a manner that thrilled young women and shocked their parents. His band, Elvis said, was “
wearing out britches from the inside
.”

In 1954, Hugh Hefner was married, living in a lovely apartment in Hyde Park, and preparing for the arrival of his second child. He was also
having an affair with a nurse
who would soon help him make a sex movie. In the September 1954 issue of
Playboy
, Hefner had reprinted a medieval tale from Boccaccio’s
Decameron
that describes the sex life of a gardener who is constantly being seduced by nuns. The same issue contained Jackie Rainbow posing nude for a centerfold, a short story about an automated sex machine that took the place of women in bed, and half a dozen photos of actress Gina Lollobrigida and her “generous bosom,” but it was the Boccaccio story that earned Hefner a condemnation from the Church and a
phone call from the chancellery
. Despite the complaints, or perhaps in part because of them,
Playboy
was the fastest growing magazine in America
.