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ABSTRACT
Oral contraception (e.g., “the pill”), an iconic technology and everyday object, has shaped women's embodied experiences and notions of self. Feminist remembrances of the pill often credit it with granting women unprecedented agency, sexual and otherwise. This article examines pill advertisements at the time of the drug's emergence. By identifying three distinct user motifs – the reliant beneficiary, the discreet consumer, and the forgetful woman – I trouble a widely reiterated liberatory narrative of technological freedom through scientific and medical discovery. Simultaneously, I examine gendered anxieties that emerge alongside women's increasing capacity for sexual autonomy. Through this index and analysis of expressions of agency, I open a space for reconsidering women's relationship to the pill as a technological object and assay the distributed agency that this ecology suggests. I use this case study to propose the political and theoretical value of more fully understanding feminist agency as paradoxical and to advocate for further investigations into vexing sites of feminist memories.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Risa Applegarth, Jennifer Mallette, Jennifer Feather, and Maria Sánchez for ideas that helped me shape an early version of this article. My appreciation goes to two anonymous Quarterly Journal of Speech reviewers and to editor Mary Stuckey, all of whom gave me detailed and invaluable feedback that strengthened my argument. University of North Carolina at Greensboro library faculty Richard Cox, David Gwynn, and Erica Rau were the team that spearheaded efforts to enable image reproduction. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Abigail Harrison whose labor and patience as a research assistant helped make this project possible.
Notes
1 Emilia Sanabria, Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 4.
2 My use of “women” reflects the universalizing and thus unacceptable category of sex that does not account for color, ability, class, sexuality, age, trans experience, etc. This word obscures the uneven and unjust experiences of a variety of women in relation to reproductive concerns. As bell hooks notes, the experiences and desires of highly educated and materially privileged white women of the contemporary feminist movement have long stood in for the experiences of all women (25). Additionally, “reproductive issues” range from “basic sex education, prenatal care, preventive health care that would help females understand how their bodies worked, to forced sterilization, unnecessary cesareans and/or hysterectomies, and the medical complications they left in their wake.” See bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Brooklyn: South End Press, 2000), 25–26. This essay interrogates memories that whitewash and straighten “women's liberation” with the intersectional goal of disrupting cohesive and universal narratives. The motifs I recover do not point to pill use by, for instance, women of color because women of color are not invoked or represented in the materials I analyze, nor are they frequently accounted for (visually, verbally) in the remembrances of “women's liberation” via the pill. For more information on black communities’ conflicting positions on birth control access (often through state sponsorship) and the reproductive agency of women of color during the 1960s, see: Simone M. Caron, “Birth Control and the Black Community in the 1960s: Genocide or Power Politics?,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (1998): 545–69.
3 Annette Gordon-Reed, 2015, “The Birth Control Pill Is Approved (May 9, 1960),” Time.com, June 4, http://time.com/3889533/25-moments-changed-america/.
4 Such memories certainly occlude fully representative and accurate histories of the uneven, raced, and classed experiences of reproductive control across the Americas.
5 Kendall R. Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 218.
6 Bodnar attends to the tension between official and vernacular memories and explores public memory symbols as capable of “mediat[ing]” in ways that result in “inevitably multivocal” commemoration. Untextured memories are those that are ripe for additional mediation because they encourage an unsatisfactory ease of assent, a lack of multivocality and a surfeit of unrevised uptake. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 13–16.
7 Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 15–16.
8 Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives 1950–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
9 One challenge of this project has been gaining access to full-page ads that are not included in digitized versions of journals. I rely on ads in JAMA and JRF because I have access to hard copies of issues from the 1960s. Additional searching has allowed me to supplement my data set.
10 For more on this advertising history, see: Julie Donahue, “A History of Drug Advertising: The Evolving Roles of Consumers and Consumer Protection,” Milbank Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2006): 659–99.
11 Phillips, “The Failure of Memory,” 220.
12 As I note above, the pill surely was liberatory to many women, and this fact is not one I am trying to dispute or ignore. To help explain my intentions, I borrow Bonnie J. Dow's perspective on the contribution of rhetorical critics vis-à-vis the truth: “I am less interested in separating fact from fiction or truth from (mis)representations than I am in making arguments for understanding these texts and their contexts in particular ways (although I am often interested in the rhetorical impact of errors of fact and omission).” See Bonnie J. Dow, Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 13.
13 Laura Michael Brown, “Remembering Silence: Bennett College Women and the 1960 Greensboro Student Sit-Ins,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2018): 49–70.
14 Thomas Dunn, “Remembering ‘A Great Fag’: Visualizing Public Memory and the Construction of Queer Space,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 439.
15 Tasha N. Dubriwny and Kristan Poirot, “Gender and Public Memory,” Southern Communication Journal 82, no. 4 (2017): 199.
16 Jordynn Jack, “Space, Time, Memory: Gendered Recollections of Wartime Los Alamos,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2007): 232.
17 Jessica Enoch, “Releasing Hold: Feminist Historiography without the Tradition,” in Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, ed. Michelle Baliff (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 62.
18 Sara VanderHaagen, “Practical Truths: Black Feminist Agency and Public Memory in Biographies for Children,” Women's Studies in Communication 35, no. 1 (2012): 18–41.
19 Urszula Maria Pruchniewska, “‘A Crash Course in Herstory’: Remembering the Women's Movement in MAKERS: Women Who Make America,” Southern Communication Journal 82, no. 4 (2017): 228–38.
20 Michael Warren Tumolo, Jennifer Biedendorf, and Kevin J. Ayotte, “Un/civil Mourning: Remembering with Jacques Derrida,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2014): 107–28.
21 Amanda K. Booher and Julie Jung, “Introduction: Situating Feminist Rhetorical Science Studies,” in Feminist Rhetorical Science Studies: Human Bodies, Posthumanist Worlds, ed. Amanda K. Booher and Julie Jung (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 30–31.
22 Anne Teresa Demo, “Hacking Agency: Apps, Autism, and Neurodiversity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 282.
23 It is important to note that although outside the scope of this article, some take a more negative view of the pill-as-revolutionary. The Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture's “The Economics of Sex” YouTube video, posted Feb. 14, 2014, proposes viewing sex as an economic transaction and the pill as a “technological shock that forever altered the mating market by profoundly lowering the cost of sex.” This “revolutionary” change, depicted verbally, visually, and aurally in the video, is lamentable. The video argues that women are sexual “gatekeepers” who have “power” and “the upper hand” in sexual relationships (all presumed heteronormative), but that this power has been disrupted by “supply, demand, and the long reach of a remarkable little pill.” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1ifNaNAB>.
24 Barak Goodman, prod., MAKERS: Women Who Make America, Part II (PBS), <http://www.pbs.org/makers/season-one/episode-two/>.
25 Richard Hauskenecht, “Shifts in Attitudes,” The Pill (PBS Online), <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pill/>
26 Goodman, MAKERS.
27 Goodman, MAKERS.
28 Anita Fream, “Shifts in Attitudes,” The Pill (PBS Online), <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pill/>
29 Elaine Tyler May, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation (New York: Basic, 2010), 3–4.
30 Watkins, On the Pill, 35.
31 PBS, “Need to Know: Erica Jong on 50 Years of the Pill,” May 6, 2010, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6rXGIZ1E-0>
32 Heather Prescott, “The Pill at Fifty: Scientific Commemoration and the Politics of American Memory,” Technology and Culture 54, no. 4 (2013): 739.
33 Sarah Hallenbeck, Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), xvi.
34 Laurie Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Boulder: Utah State University Press, 2015), 86.
35 Dubriwny and Poirot, “Gender and Public Memory,” 200.
36 Pruchniewska, “‘A Crash Course in Herstory,’” 237.
37 Booher and Jung, “Introduction,” 25.
38 Joshua Gunn and Dana L. Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” Communication Theory 20, no. 1 (2010): 54. In this article, the authors also note significant synergies between but distinctions among postmodernism, poststructuralism, and posthumanism.
39 Erin J. Rand, Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014), 24–5; See an earlier discussion of this agonism in Amy Koerber, “Rhetorical Agency, Resistance, and the Disciplinary Rhetorics of Breastfeeding,” Technical Communication Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2006): 87–101.
40 Demo, “Hacking Agency,” 293.
41 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 1.
42 Jason Barrett-Fox, “Posthuman Feminism and the Rhetoric of Silent Cinema: Distributed Agency, Ontic Media, and the Possibility of a Networked Historiography,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 3 (2016): 248.
43 Barrett-Fox, “Posthuman Feminism and the Rhetoric of Silent Cinema,” 246, 252. Note that Barrett-Fox draws upon the work of Irene Whitney Crawford in using the root/route metaphor.
44 Hallenbeck, Claiming the Bicycle, xviii.
45 Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the history of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 2 (1992): 140–59; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26, no. 2 (1993): 153–59.
46 Gunn and Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” 72. The authors explain that a “dialectical way of thinking about agency sees an individual only in relation to other individuals, social relations, and histories. Consequently, the individual will cannot exist [independent] of interactivity, dialogue, and collectivity.”
47 Barrett-Fox, “Posthuman Feminism and the Rhetoric of Silent Cinema,” 246.
48 Sara Hayden, “Toward a Collective Rhetoric Rooted in Choice: Consciousness Raising in the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Ourselves and Our Children,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 3 (2018): 241.
49 Hayden, “Toward a Collective Rhetoric Rooted in Choice,” 240.
50 Phillips, “The Failure of Memory,” 221.
51 Demo, “Hacking Agency,” 278.
52 Demo, “Hacking Agency,” 282. Demo uses disability theory to identify “building blocks” of agency, which include “action, expression, intention, and effect.”
53 Barrett-Fox, “Posthuman Feminism and the Rhetoric of Silent Cinema,” 251.
54 Bodnar, Remaking America, 14.
55 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 1945, Reprint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969): 3.
56 Searle, “The First Prescription for Control of Fertility,” Journal of the American Medical Association 185, no. 3, advertisement, July 20, 1963: 10–11.
57 Searle, “From Soranos … to Science,” Journal of the American Medical Association 190, no. 1, advertisement, Oct. 5, 1964: 242–43.
58 Searle, “Enovid Norethynodrel with Mestranol,” Journal of the American Medical Association 186, no. 12, advertisement, December 21, 1963: 190–91.
59 The assumption advanced about Soranos as an early medical practitioner who likely distinguished between advanced and lay healers is not accurate. See Owsei Temken, “Introduction,” in Soranus’ Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), xxxviii.
60 Searle, “The First Fully Feminine Molecule for Cyclic Control of Ovulation,” Journal of the American Medical Association 184, no. 7, advertisement, May 18, 1963: 100–01.
61 Organon, “When Friendly Advice Would Help,” Journal of Reproduction and Fertility 8, no. 3, advertisement, Dec. 1964: vi.
62 Parke, Davis, and Company, “Norlestrin,” Journal of Reproduction and Fertility 9, no. 1, advertisement, Feb. 1965: x.
63 Organon, “The Lyndiol 2.5 Doctor Prescribes with Authority,” Journal of Reproduction and Fertility 19, no. 2, advertisement, July 1969: v.
64 Lyndiol, “According to Plan,” Journal of Reproduction and Fertility 7, no. 3, advertisement, June 1964: v.
65 Jonathan Eig, The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 269–70.
66 hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, 27.
67 “An Early (1964) Birth Control Pill: Enovid-E (‘Physician’s Professional Sample’), U.S.A.,” Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health, http://www.mum.org/enovid11.htm (accessed September 3, 2019); Searle, “For ‘The Pill’ … the Perfect Pack,” Journal of the American Medical Association 191, no. 4, advertisement, Jan. 25, 1965: 234–35.
68 Patricia Peck Gossel's history of oral contraceptives packaging includes references to “[g]ynecology textbooks and consumer manuals” that offered up similar solutions such as placing one's pills next to a toothbrush or the kitchen range or using the theme music for the 11 o’clock news as a mnemonic device for consistent usage. See Patricia Peck Gossel, “Packaging the Pill,” in Manifesting Medicine: Bodies and Machines, ed. Robert Bud, Bernard Finn, and Helmuth Trishler (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1999), 115.
69 Gossel, “Packaging the Pill,” 115.
70 To view a later example of compact-case design see: Diane Wendt and Mallory Warner, 2015, “Packaging the Pill,” O Say Can You See?: Stories from the National Museum of American History, June 19, <http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/packaging-pill>
71 To view an image of the blue lady packaging, see: Jessica Lott, 2013, “Critical Intersections: Histories of Latinos, Reproduction, and Disability,” O Say Can You See?: Stories from the National Museum of American History, Nov. 3, <http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2013/11/critical-intersections-histories-of-latinos-reproduction-and-disability.html>
72 Sanabria, Plastic Bodies, 8.
73 Gossel, “Packaging the Pill,” 105.
74 Gossel, “Packaging the Pill,” 108.
75 Gossel, “Packaging the Pill,” 106.
76 Gossel, “Packaging the Pill,” 106.
77 See, for example this web page and corresponding podcast episode: “Repackaging the Pill,” 99% Invisible, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/repackaging-the-pill/
78 Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation, “Ortho-Novum,” Journal of the American Medical Association 183, no. 7, advertisement, November 16, 1963: 236.
79 The British Drug Houses, “Serial 28,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 101, no. 9, advertisement, November 1, 1969: 31.
80 Organon, “Protect the New Patient from Her Own Forgetfulness,” Journal of Reproduction and Fertility 20, no. 2, advertisement, Nov. 1969: iv.
81 Eig, The Birth of the Pill, 238.
82 Eig, The Birth of the Pill, 241–42.
83 See, for instance: Metrecal advertisement, Good Housekeeping, Sept. 1963: 27.
84 See, for instance: Listerine advertisement, Good Housekeeping, Sept. 1963: 21.
85 Sergeant's advertisement, Good Housekeeping, Sept. 1963: 187.
86 Dara Rossman Regaignon, “Anxious Uptakes: Nineteenth-Century Advice Literature as a Rhetorical Genre,” College English 78, no. 2 (2015): 141.
87 See, for example, Regaignon, “Anxious Uptakes,” 139–61; Marika Seigel, The Rhetoric of Pregnancy (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013).
88 Nathan Stormer, “In Living Memory: Abortion as Cultural Amnesia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 3 (2002): 269.
89 Stormer, “In Living Memory,” 270.
90 Sarah Vartabedian, “No Cause for Comfort Here: False Witnesses to ‘Peace,’” Southern Communication Journal 82, no. 4 (2017): 259.
91 Gunn and Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” 61.
92 Hayden, “Toward a Collective Rhetoric Rooted in Choice,” 252.
93 Gunn and Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” 66.
94 Gunn and Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” 68.
95 Cheryl Glenn, Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 105.