Over the last ten years or so, “fertility” to many of my female friends, colleagues and wider circle of acquaintances has often been about encouraging the arrival of babies, rather than preventing them.
Inadvertently, I’ve become familiar with words and phrases like IVF, surrogacy, Clomid, cervical mucus and the like. Although two-thirds of British women in the 20-24 age group take the Pill, when you’re in your 40s (or even in your late 30s), you tend not to do so, either by virtue of your age (and weight, or smoking status) or because you actively want to have children and so popping a daily pill from its little multi-coloured blister pack is an act from the past.
In series one of iconic TV show “Mad Men”, there’s a scene where ambitious Peggy, newly working in Manhattan and determined to be independent, goes to see a doctor (who smokes throughout her examination – another example of how this visually stunning TV show uses props to invoke a sense of time, place and era) in order to obtain the Pill.
It’s the early 1960s and, for the first time, there are doctors who will provide (unmarried) girls like Peggy with the tool to free them from their fertility.
I’m nearly as old as the Pill, a fact of which I was reminded by this article in the weekend’s Observer, which celebrates the Pill’s 50th birthday and reminds us of how far we’ve come since Peggy’s day. How about this quote?
“Well into the 1970s, women in Britain and America were still pretending to be married in order to get a prescription; some used to pass around the same battered wedding ring in the doctor’s waiting room.”
And as novelist Margaret Drabble comments:
“I think I would have had a child a year if I hadn’t started taking it.”
So, happy golden birthday to the Pill, an iconic symbol of late 20th century autonomy for women.
Women and the 1911 census
28 MarIf you’re in the UK, did you fill in your census form this weekend? I did, and it made me think … about how much my life has changed in the last 10 years (I got married, moved to my current house, have done all sorts of things in work terms) and also about what stories my house could tell if it could talk.
Of course, assuming that there were female residents, one thing they couldn’t then do (or, indeed do for between the next seven and seventeen years) was to vote, given that women were then denied that right and the UK was in the grip of the suffrage movement. My friend Rachel shared a link to this fascinating article from The Times, published back in the glory days of 2009 when access was free, which details how some 1911 women used the census forms to make a protest, as part of a coordinated boycott over their continuing lack of the right to vote.
“The documents show how women refused to fill in their names and left comments in the margins. One suffragette taking part in the boycott arranged by the Women’s Freedom League wrote: “If I am intelligent enough to fill in this paper, I am intelligent enough to put a cross on a voting paper.”
“Another glued a poster over the form stating: “No votes for women, no census.” A piece of paper stuck to the form suggests that the women stayed away from households where the census was taken to attend a protest in Trafalgar Square.”
As I often do when considering history, progress and change, this has made me reflect upon the privileged era in which we live. How lucky we are today that we can use the 2011 census form as just that – a tool to capture socio-economic data about the world in which we live.
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