I was visiting metafilter today and came across this article from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker a few years ago. The focus is on how the man who invented "The Pill" was a Catholic and was, therefore, keen to make the chemicals of the pill fit within those beliefs. But it is more about the changes of modernity to women's bodies based on evidence from medical anthropologists and new cross cultural studies between women in Japan and the US. The upshot is that the menstral cycle designed into the chemistry of the pill is important for preventing certain forms of cancer, but it adds to the risk of breast cancer. This is because, according to these studies, a 28-day, 12 a year, menstral cycle is relatively new and is largely the result of changes in reproductive practices. The Pill was invented with a mind to keep this 28/12 cycle going because it was assumed to be natural and, therefore, simply a chemical way of using the rhythym method of birth control. But the focus on its contraceptive capacity has overshadowed the use it can have for cancer prevention among women who aren't just baby-making machines. One of the proponents of a new drug that intends to focus on this oncological aspect of contraception has this to say about the conditions he is observing:
But the modern way of living represents an extraordinary change in female biology. Women are going out and becoming lawyers, doctors, presidents of countries. They need to understand that what we are trying to do isn't abnormal. It's just as normal as when someone hundreds of years ago had menarche at seventeen and had five babies and had three hundred fewer menstrual cycles than most women have today. The world is not the world it was. And some of the risks that go with the benefits of a woman getting educated and not getting pregnant all the time are breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and we need to deal with it. I have three daughters. The earliest grandchild I had was when one of them was thirty-one. That's the way many women are now. They ovulate from twelve or thirteen until their early thirties. Twenty years of uninterrupted ovulation before their first child! That's a brand-new phenomenon!
Many on the right will try to make this about the women's movement or about women's lib. But as bell hooks and others have noted, the problem with seeing women at work as an issue of the women's movement is heavily influenced by a white, middle class perception of women's existence--at least in regard to labor. Minority and working class women had been laboring outside the home or for some form of wages inside the home for the better part of the last century. What began to happen in the 1970s wasn't that women were empowered to go to work, or that they were encouraged to see that they could work on their own and become the kinds of professionals only their husbands could be--or, more importantly, that they didn't need a husband to be successful--though it seems that all these things happened; it was also that more middle class families, like the one I grew up in, needed two incomes just to make it possible to have that three bedroom, two car, one vacation lifestyle that they had been promised and were expected to perform.
To say that women's place is in the home is a laughable anachronism in social and economic terms and its focus on political or cultural changes, while entirely accurate on some level, does little to focus its lens on the reason those changes stuck. It is further hypocritical for the very people who deride female welfare recipients for having too many children or for failing to work while they have children to also refuse to endorse methods that might help them have control over their own bodies. Of course endorsing them too strongly would be equally abhorrent. I remember a program in Fort Worth that offered that five-year birth control method (probably a result of this study) to women who were on drugs and would even pay them to submit to it. In terms of public health, I guess it is hard to argue with, but it just sounds so much like the forced sterilization of the mentally retarded in Virginia to make it palatable as a state program. Perhaps that's why the Fort Worth program was private.
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