Prescribing the pill: Politics, culture, and the sexual revolution in America's heartland

By analyzing the introduction and use of the birth control pill in one community (Lawrence, Kansas), this article explores notions of cultural authority and the relationship between national culture and institutions and local events in America's postwar ''sexual revolution.'' The pill, which played an important role in the sexual revolution, had to be prescribed by physicians who, in the main, agreed with the majority of Americans that unmarried women had no right to sexual intercourse or to contraceptives. In Lawrence, struggles over the pill were structured by federal initiatives (programs addressing poverty and population growth) and national organizations such as planned Parenthood, Inc. and the American Public Health Association. Local actors, including the Department of Public Health, university students and administrators, the local Planned Parenthood organization, and feminist groups, fought not only about sexual morality, but over the meaning of the pill. Did the pill belong to a paradigm of population control! Clinical medicine and reproductive health? Morality? Women's right to control their own bodies! This article attempts to detail the multiple sites of power, languages of negotiation, and critical structural changes that created the ground on which these struggles took place.