The Girls Who Went Away (7 page)

—Sue

The other fateful irony about the explosion in premarital sex in the postwar years was that society at large failed to acknowledge the magnitude of change under way, and failed to act responsibly to educate the youth about pregnancy and prevention. Young people were clearly secretive about their behavior, but by the 1960s so many pregnancies were occurring that the warning signs should have been clear and troubling enough to sound an alarm. Instead, adult society effectively turned a blind eye to the situation, and in the main simply continued to profess that young people should hold out until marriage.

Women were expected to wait and learn about sex from their husbands, who would bring their sexual experience to the marriage. I’ve never quite figured out how that was supposed to be mathematically possible, but presumably the theory was that the future husbands gained their experience with a few bad girls who were not marriage material and who were having sex with the majority of the male population.

Most parents simply did not want to acknowledge that their sons and daughters were having sex. Not my son. Not my daughter. But with millions of young people having sex with no planning and no protection, there was a high likelihood that parents’ denial would be short-lived. School systems had not yet begun offering substantial sex education and, incredibly, in the late 1960s were still referring to sexual intercourse as “the marriage act.” Sex education generally consisted of watching a scratchy movie that showed egg and sperm meeting. Wherever this mysterious meeting place was, it seemed to have nothing to do with being in the backseat of a car with your boyfriend. Many of the women I interviewed were utterly uninformed about sex and pregnancy and learned what little they knew from their boyfriends.

I can remember in sixth grade we had a film. You know, the sperm and the egg and that whole thing. There was no sex education. My mom sent away for the Kotex kit in the mail and it came and there were all the different sizes and shapes of pads. Of course, this was
before tampons. She didn’t really talk to me but she sort of supplied the information. That was probably the best she could do. I remember there was controversy about should we have sex education in high school at the time, but I don’t think we ever had any. And condoms weren’t as available to kids as they are now. We were oblivious. I mean, certainly I knew that if you had sex you could get pregnant. I wasn’t that naïve. But abstinence wasn’t thought of. You were just horny teenagers and that was that.

—Becky

If there was any talk of sex in the home, it was usually the sex talk the girls had with their mother around their first period and mainly concerned itself with the wearing of Kotex pads and the stretchy belts that kept them in place.

I think I was in the fifth or sixth grade and I went to the bathroom and I’m pulling my panties down and they had blood on them and I started screaming because I didn’t know what was going on. They called my mother and she came and picked me up from school. We stopped by a drugstore, she left me in the car and went in and then handed me a bag and told me go in the bathroom and put it on. I sat in that bathroom probably an hour trying to figure out how all this mess worked. There was a stretchy thing with clamps on it, and then these pads. Scared me to death.

—Joyce I

When parents did talk to their daughters about sex, they often began the sentence with the word
don’t,
as in “Don’t ever let a boy touch you.” Or, if pregnancy was even acknowledged as something that could
occur
before marriage, “Don’t ever come home pregnant.” This directive rarely included an explanation of how one might actually get or not get pregnant. Since most adolescents are eager to grow up as quickly as possible, the silence and mystery surrounding sex surely only made it all the more intriguing.

My mother talk about sex? Oh, God. Please. “You can’t be kissing boys. You can’t be letting anybody touch you. Sex is dirty. Sex is
bad.” It was always bad things. Always taboo. It was never healthy, never, never a healthy talk. My mother was twenty-four with four kids. Probably that’s why sex was bad.

We did not have sex education in school. I mean, I graduated high school in ’64, and sex was not discussed. You were not supposed to have sex until you were married and that was it. My goodness. You just didn’t talk about sex. It was all negative, it only got you in trouble. She was right about that, though, when you think about it. She was right. I should have listened to her.

—Carolyn I

I was throwing up and one of my friends said, “You’re probably pregnant.” And I said, “Oh no, no, no, you can’t be pregnant unless you’re married.” That’s what my parents told me: “You have to be married to have a baby.” So I couldn’t be pregnant because I wasn’t married. Sex education was in sixth grade all the Campfire Girls went and saw this film. I didn’t understand it. I mean, it was just the man has the sperm and the woman has the egg, and somehow or other they make a baby. They didn’t talk about body parts, ever. Oh gosh, no. Men and women, back in that day, slept in separate beds on television. I’m adopted and my parents were older. They were scared to death to talk about sex, scared to death to talk about anything.

—Nancy II

Sex was just not discussed in those days. You found out from your friends. The girls would talk at pajama parties or if they got together at somebody’s house after school, but sex talked about in school? Oh, my God, no! I remember when
Peyton Place
was published. It was banned, so we all had a copy of
Peyton Place.
We would stick it inside a book in study hall and read it. If you ever got caught reading that book—I mean, you can’t even imagine the detentions and the phone calls home. Life would not be worth living.

And you did not discuss sex at home. I can see my mother sitting there knitting. My mother was a great knitter. She was like
Madame Defarge in
A Tale of Two Cities.
She would knit, knit, knit to avoid conversation. I remember her knitting away and all of a sudden I said to her, “What is sexual intercourse?” She looked me right in the eye and said, “Don’t bother me, I’m counting.”

—Maureen II

The mothers’ denial of the reality that their daughters might need some facts about sex and pregnancy is especially illogical given that, statistically, almost half of the mothers themselves had had sex before marriage, and some had walked down the aisle pregnant. But then again, logic usually has little to do with sex, and parents usually don’t think
their
child is having sex. That has likely not changed over time.

Even for those who were somewhat aware of how to prevent pregnancy, effective contraceptives were hard to come by. The legacy of blame and shame that so many of the women who became pregnant have had to live with has been perpetuated in part by a current lack of awareness about just how difficult contraceptives were to get hold of in those postwar decades. This was particularly true of contraceptives for single women.

Many of the laws in effect in the 1950s and 1960s had been in place since the Victorian era. In 1873 for the first time in U.S. history, birth control was prohibited by law with the passage of the Comstock Law, which criminalized sending “obscene” matter through the mail.
¹¹
In the mid-1800s, women could send away for informational pamphlets, and ads for douches to prevent pregnancy were common in women’s magazines and newspapers, though they were often veiled in nonspecific language having to do with cleansing or health.
¹²
In fact, information about birth-control methods had been passed down through generations of women, long before devices were regulated through the medical establishment. Women were using vaginal sponges several thousand years before Christ.
¹³
Whether through herbal potions, vaginal suppositories, diaphragms, the rhythm method, or douching, women have tried to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

But in 1872, Anthony Comstock, a religious reformer and the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, drafted an anti-obscenity bill, which included a ban on contraceptives. He argued that contraceptive devices were obscene and sinful because they
prevented
conception. Comstock
successfully campaigned for the enactment of the bill as a federal law, and he was also instrumental in twenty-four states adopting their own versions of the Comstock Law, restricting the sale of contraceptives at the state level. Despite the diligence of birth-control advocates like Margaret Sanger in the early 1900s, as late as the 1960s some states still criminalized merely dispensing information about birth control or making contraceptive devices available to women.
¹⁴
Even as laws changed state by state, the moralistic attitudes endured and few unmarried women were willing to attempt an appointment with a doctor to obtain contraceptives.

I mean, the lack of information in 1966 was astounding. If you wanted to get birth-control pills, you had to be flashing a diamond solitaire. Doctors really didn’t give them to you. Why would you need those? You shouldn’t be having sex anyway.

—Nancy III

During the late 1950s and through most of the 1960s, the most effective means of birth control—the pill and the intrauterine device—were either unavailable or inaccessible to single women. The pill was available for the regulation of menstrual periods beginning in 1957 and was approved for contraceptive use by the FDA in 1960. The IUD also became available in the 1960s. But both the pill and the IUD posed safety concerns when they were initially released and it was not until the early 1970s that both were generally considered to be safe. It was not the safety of contraceptives, however, that prevented doctors in the 1960s from prescribing the pill or the IUD to unmarried women but state laws or personal moral values.
¹⁵
The diaphragm was the device most widely used by married women in the 1950s, but it was also largely unavailable to single women because a doctor’s visit was required.
¹⁶

I had finished nursing school and I was working as a nurse. And, you know, one thing led to another and we had sex. That’s what happens. Birth control just wasn’t available. I mean, condoms were available but hardly ever used. The birth-control pill was on the market, but in those days you really had to be married to go to a doctor and ask. There weren’t walk-in clinics. There wasn’t any of
that stuff. Birth control just was not a subject that was talked about. If you knew somebody who was not married and was taking oral contraceptives, they were taking them to regulate their period. I couldn’t even tell you how many people had
that
story.

—Maureen II

I knew I should be doing something to prevent pregnancy but I would never have gone to a doctor. You had to pretend you were married to get birth-control pills. I could never have done that. I’m not an actress. There was a girl in our dormitory who sold them—I don’t know how she got them. I started taking them, but I felt terribly guilty because it went against what I had been taught. So I sort of took them and then I didn’t take them, and then I took them and I didn’t take them, and I got pregnant. I mean, I just didn’t really understand that you had to continuously take them.

—Maggie

The most readily available contraceptive for nonmarried couples was condoms but they were often kept behind the counter at the pharmacy, and in some towns just asking to purchase one might result in a phone call from the pharmacist to the boy’s parents. Sometimes prophylactics were found in gas-station vending machines, but for a number of reasons—including difficulty getting them or young men feeling confident that they knew how to prevent pregnancy without a condom—they were not often used by young people.

I got pregnant at the end of July 1969. I remember, I went to the drive-in movie to see
Easy Rider
because the birth father loved motorcycles. He was just home from Vietnam and the first thing he did was buy a motorcycle. So we had to go see that movie.

I mean, this was before the days of birth control. You had to be eighteen to buy a rubber. They didn’t have them in Stop & Shop, like they have today. They were down at the corner drugstore. The boys would maybe buy them, sneak them, or something. But as a female? To go and buy rubbers? Oh, my God, that did not happen. (I probably should have said “prophylactics” but
you’ll white that out.) There’s no way. They wouldn’t have given them to you. And you think, “Aw, it’s not gonna happen to me. I’ll never get pregnant.”

We had dated for about two and a half months before I got pregnant. But that was the first time I ever had sex. In the backseat of that car, watching
Easy Rider.

—Cathy II

The state of Connecticut, home state of Anthony Comstock, still had a law in 1961 that prohibited counseling and medical treatment to
married
persons for the purposes of preventing conception. The constitutionality of that prohibition was struck down in 1965, when the Supreme Court decided the case of
Griswold v. Connecticut.
¹⁷
Estelle T. Griswold, the executive director of Planned Parenthood League in Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, a Yale professor and physician who served as medical director of the league, were arrested in 1961 for giving information and instruction to a married woman to help her prevent contraception. The Supreme Court’s decision in
Griswold v. Connecticut
guaranteed all married couples in the country the right to receive information and services to prevent pregnancy based on the right of privacy in marital relations.

By 1970 most women, whether married or single, were able to get prescriptions for the pill or other contraceptive devices and control their own pregnancy prevention. But in the state of Massachusetts a law still prohibited the dispensation of any kind of birth control to an unmarried man or woman. In 1967 William Baird, longtime reproductive-rights crusader, challenged the state’s anticontraceptives law—which also stipulated that only doctors or pharmacists could provide contraceptives—by giving vaginal foam to a woman after a 1967 lecture on birth control at Boston University. Baird was not an authorized distributor of contraceptives and he was promptly arrested, convicted of a felony, and spent thirty-six days in jail for “crimes against chastity.” Only when his case,
Eisenstadt v. Baird,
reached the Supreme Court and was decided in his favor in 1972 was access to birth control guaranteed to all single men and women in the United States.
¹⁸