Shifts in Attitude: After
Sylvia Clark: '...I could do something that would give part of me back to me...'Richard Hauskenecht: 'Sexual freedom.'Anita Fream: '...we did see it as world altering...'Linda Gordon: '...it was challenging... the most basic assumptions...'Anita Fream: '...for the first time in my life I could think about sex just as what it was...'Anita Fream: '...sex came out in the open...'Sylvia Clark: '...being able to continue a career...'Anita Fream: '...to please myself...'

Anita Fream | video | transcript

Well I don't think we had any understanding of how much the pill actually would change the world. But we did see it as world altering because in our world if you wanted to have sex before you were married, pregnancy was the big issue. And although I would have said, "I live such a sheltered life," I didn't totally understand sex, much less something like abortion, somehow I knew that there were places that if you had enough money you could go and get an abortion and every girl I knew, knew that. To this day, I don't know exactly how. Certainly no adult I knew of would have talked to me about something like that. But it was a knowledge that somehow managed to seep through. And that was a big fear. That was a huge fear. Where would you come up with the money? How would you feel about it afterwards, of course? But it was seen I guess as the only real alternative because at that point we weren't the girls who would drop out of school and get married because they got pregnant. We weren't those girls and we knew it. So the pill was a way out of that whole horrible dilemma.







Before