One Small Pill for Womankind: One Big Dose for the U.S.

Gregory Goodwin Pincus created the birth control pill stimulating a new tidal wave of women's rights movements. From one small pill, new channels that had been dammed down to a trickle became a mighty flood again. With the ability to prevent pregnancy without risking a dangerous abortion women found the strength to fight against male-dominated areas that were still left untouched from the first series of movements by their predecessors. From how long they stayed in the workforce to the freedom of their sexuality to changing laws and stepping up for their rights, women came alive again with renewed ferocity.

Women and the workforce met in few places, for only brief time and very rarely in the general public eye. If seen in the public eye they were with their male counterpart, their husbands or fathers. In the 1960s because it was legal and acceptable within society, companies openly discriminated against women based on their sex. “In 1961 there were 454 federal civil-service-job categories for college graduates, and more than 200 of them were restricted to male candidates” (Collin 7).

Women were not doctors, if they were so inclined even after counseling they were advised and directed to towards taking a position as pediatrician. They were not lawyers and even those that were legally lawyers infrequently practiced because of the extreme lack of hiring firms, instead they would become clerks and secretaries. Their jobs only consisted of labor, only if a farmer's wife or daughter (Collin 6) or when the country was at war and all the men were unavailable and not wanting for the position. “There was, for all practical purposes, a national consensus that women could not be airplane pilots, firefights, television news anchors, c...

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...950s” (17). Women, especially single women, found uncharted freedom of being able to find pleasure in their sexual activity that twenty, even five years ago would have been thought of as absurd and unlikely (MacLean 17). In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) a civil rights group for women formed (MacLean 14) started with just one thousand members but its size grew to an incredible four hundred thousand by 1974 (MacLean 16). NOW originally was mainly focused on equal opportunity for women in the workplace but they also fought for “maternity leave and child care; equal education; a woman's rights to control her own fertility; and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)...” MacLean 16). A new generation of activists was born and much like the women before them they began to realize the the abundance of “'sexism' (a word they coined)'” (MacLean 16).