Yesterday I joined a BBC World Service discussion on the fiftieth anniversary of the pill. Today, research is published by a team at Sheffield University showing that women prefer sex in long-term relationships to one night stands. They were clearly surprised:
These findings demonstrate that conservative attitudes towards women's sexual behaviour remain, and contradict the image of today's independent women who seek the pleasure of sexual interaction without the ties of a relationship.
These researchers, and last night's interviewer, seem to share the view that the freedom ushered in by the invention of the pill should have opened a new world in which sex, freed from procreation, could become just another form of pleasure - like going to the pictures or dancing. How odd of women to keep on in the old fashioned belief that sex (at its best) is about a deepening of intimacy that comes only within a relationship of trust. After all surely, is it more liberated to wake up in the morning with a bloke whose name you have forgotten, who possibly votes Conservative, and may have given you a disease, than a man who shares your values and your life?
The pill has been a very important tool in the liberation of women - not because it freed us to sleep around but because it allowed us to be economically independent. Before the pill, and liberal abortion laws, women could not have sex without the risk of pregnancy. Pregnancy meant the end of economic independence. A pregnant woman became immediately dependent on the man who had impregnated her. If he refused to take on this responsibility she had to resort to dangerous backstreet abortion, or have her baby adopted. If he married her she was literally enslaved: totally depended on his earnings to keep her and her child.
The pill was not and is not the only reliable form of contraception. But it became both the tool and the symbol of women's independence. The pill broke that link in the chain that had eternally tied women to male earnings. If women could plan when to have babies they could also plan not to have them. They could decide to have a career without being ambushed by their biology. They could opt for education without feeling that they had to chose between the brain and the body. The pill changed the way in which women thought about themselves and opened the door to legislation that then made economic independence a reality.
This freedom is what really came with the pill. The fact that it also allows women to indulge in the odd sexual adventure is certainly not to be discounted but lets not pretend that bed-hopping, is or has ever been, a necessary part of women's liberation. The Sheffield researchers would do well to avoid imposing their own normative values on their future research.
