Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (64 page)

The Pill: 1950s, Shrewsbury, Massachusetts

No event in the history of contraception has had a more profound effect on birth control than the introduction of an oral contraceptive. “The pill,” as it quickly became known, contains hormone-like substances that enter
the bloodstream and disrupt the production of ova and ovulation. Although birth control pills were predicted in the mid-nineteenth century, they did not become a reality until the 1950s, the result of pioneering medical research and the encouragement of Margaret Sanger, organizer of the planned parenthood movement in the United States.

The pill originated in an unexpected discovery made in the tropical jungles of Mexico in the 1930s. There, chemistry professor Russell Marker, on leave from Pennsylvania State College, was experimenting with a group of plant steroids known as sapogenins, which produce a soaplike foam in water. He discovered a chemical process that transformed the sapogenin diosgenin into the human female sex hormone progesterone. The wild Mexican yam,
cabeza de negro
, proved to be a rich source of the hormone precursor.

At that time, progesterone was used to treat menstrual disorders and prevent miscarriages. But the drug was available only from European pharmaceutical companies, and methods of preparing it were laborious and costly. Still, Marker was unable to acquire financial backing from an American pharmaceutical company to pursue synthetic progesterone research.

He rented a laboratory in Mexico City, collected ten tons of yams, and at his own expense isolated pure diosgenin. Back in the United States, he synthesized more than 2,000 grams of progesterone, which at the time was worth $160,000. The synthesis was far simpler than the traditional methods, and in time it would bring down the price of sex steroids from eighty dollars to one dollar a gram.

Researchers in the late 1940s began to reevaluate the possibility of an inexpensive oral contraceptive. Chemist Gregory Pincus at the Worchester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, tested a yam-derived ovulation inhibitor, norethynodrel, on 1,308 volunteers in Puerto Rico in 1958. It established menstrual regularity and was an effective contraceptive. Searle Pharmaceuticals applied for FDA approval to market norethynodrel. Despite intense opposition from religious groups opposed to birth control, research and marketing efforts continued, and in 1960, women across America were introduced to Enovid, history’s first oral contraceptive.

Although there was considerable social condemnation of the pill, sales figures revealed that in the privacy of their homes across the country, women were not reluctant to take it regularly. By the end of 1961, a half-million American women were on the pill, and that number more than doubled the following year.

Since that time, drug companies have worked to develop a variety of safer versions of oral contraceptives, with fewer side effects. None of today’s oral contraceptives, taken by approximately seventy million women worldwide, contains the original yam derivative norethynodrel. Researchers believe that oral contraceptives will remain women’s major birth control aid until the introduction, projected for the 1990s, of an antipregnancy vaccine that will offer several years’ immunization against conception.

Planned Parenthood
. A woman who encouraged chemist Gregory Pincus to perfect the pill was Margaret Sanger. Born in 1883, Sanger had ten brothers and sisters and witnessed the difficult life of her Irish mother, characterized by continual pregnancy and childbirth, chronic poverty, and an early death. As a maternity nurse on Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century, she was equally dismayed by the high rate of unwanted pregnancies and self-induced abortions. She believed that fewer children, spaced further apart, could help many families attain a better standard of living. But when Sanger attempted to learn more about family planning, she discovered that sound information simply did not exist.

There was a straightforward reason. The Comstock Act of 1873, named after Anthony Comstock, a postal inspector and leader of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had labeled all contraceptive information “obscene.” As a result, it ceased being published. Physicians Sanger interviewed were reluctant even to discuss artificial birth control for fear of being quoted and later prosecuted under the Comstock Act.

To acquire what information existed, she traveled throughout Europe in 1913, returning home the following year armed with literature and methodology. She published contraceptive information in her own monthly magazine,
Woman Rebel
, which earned her nine counts of defiance against the Comstock law and resulted in her journal’s being barred from the U.S. mails. In 1916, she opened the world’s first birth control clinic, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, offering women accurate and practical advice on avoiding pregnancy and planning the size of a family.

New York City police soon closed the clinic as a “public nuisance.” Diaphragms, condoms, and literature were confiscated. And Margaret Sanger went to prison. The U.S. Court of Appeals eventually ruled that doctors could provide prophylactic devices to women strictly for the “cure and prevention of disease,” not for contraception. In 1927, Margaret Sanger organized the first World Population Conference, and twenty years later she launched the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

In the early 1950s, she visited the Massachusetts laboratory of Dr. Gregory Pincus. She convinced him of the need for a simple oral contraceptive, and she championed his invention up until her death in 1966. By then, the pill was six years old and four million American women were consuming 2,600 tons of birth control pills annually.

Nightgown and Pajamas: Post-16th Century, France and Persia

Late in the sixteenth century, when tight-corseted, multilayered clothes and powdered wigs reigned as vogue, it became a luxury for both men and women at day’s end to slip into something more comfortable. In that era, the term “nightgown” originated in Europe to describe a full-length unisex
frock, fastened in front, with long sleeves. Intended also for warmth before there was central heating, a nightgown was often of velvet or wool, lined and trimmed in fur. For the next hundred fifty years, men and women wore the same basic garment to bed, with differences existing only in feminine embellishments of lace, ribbon, or embroidery.

A substantive divergence in styles began in the eighteenth century with the emergence of the
negligee
for women. The term arose as differences in styles and fabrics of men’s and women’s nightgowns grew more pronounced. A woman’s negligee—a tighter garment in silk or brocade with ruffles or lace, often belted at the waist—not only was for sleeping but also was informal wear for lounging in the privacy of the home. The notion of relaxing in a negligee—that is, of performing no household work—is inherent in the word’s origin:
neglegere
, Latin for “to neglect,” compounded from
neg
and
legere
, meaning “not to pick up.”

The man’s plainer, baggier nightgown grew shorter in the same century, to become a “night shirt.” It was not uncommon for a man to relax at home in trousers and a night shirt, and even to wear the shirt during the day as an undergarment. One popular pair of lounging trousers was imported from Persia. Loose-fitting and modeled after the harem pants worn by Eastern women, they were named pajamas, derived from
pae
, Persian for “leg garment,” and
jama
, “clothing.” The night shirt and Persian trousers, originally uncoordinated in color, fabric, and print, evolved into the more stylized pajama ensemble we know today.

Underwear: Mid-1800s, Europe

Unmentionables. Indescribables. Unwhisperables. These are among the many euphemisms men’s and women’s underwear acquired during its relatively brief history. In the ancient world, beneath loose robes and togas, underwear was not recognized as a standard article of attire.

Prior to the nineteenth century, underwear (if worn at all) was simple: a loose chemise and some type of drawers. In some cases, an undergarment was designed as an integral part of a particular outfit. Intended to be seen by no one except the wearer, an undergarment, in style and fit, was of minor concern. A notable exception, during the periods when a woman’s waist and bust were, respectively, artificially cinched and distended, was the corset, which was literally engineered to achieve its effect.

Fashion historians record a major change in underwear and the public’s attitude toward it beginning around the 1830s. Undergarments became heavier, longer, and a routine part of dress. For the first time in history,
not
to wear underclothing implied uncleanliness, coarseness, lower-class disregard for civility, or licentious moral character. This transformation is believed to have resulted from a confluence of three factors: the blossoming of Victorian prudishness and its corresponding dictates of modesty in attire; the introduction of finer, lighter dress fabrics, which in themselves called
for underclothing; and the medical professions’ awareness of germs, which, combined with a body chill, led to illness.

Advertisement for 1880s woolen underwear, believed to possess miraculous health benefits
.

This last factor was of particular significance. Physicians advised against catching “a chill” as if it were as tangible an entity as a virus, and the public developed an almost pathological fear of exposing any body part except the face to the reportedly germ-laden air. Pasteur had recently proved the germ theory of disease and Lister was campaigning for antiseptics in medicine. The climate, so to speak, called for underwear.

Underclothing then was white, usually starched, often scratchy, and made chiefly from cambric batiste, coarse calico, or flannel. From about the 1860s, women’s undergarments were designed with an emphasis on attractiveness, and silk first became a popular underwear fabric in the 1880s.

Woolen underwear, invariably scratchy, swept Europe and America in the same decade, ushered in by the medical profession.

What came to be called the Wool Movement began in Britain under Dr. Gustav Jaeger, a former professor of physiology at Stuttgart University and founder of Jaeger Company, manufacturers of wool clothing. Dr. Jaeger advocated the health benefits of wearing coarse, porous wool in contact with the skin, since it allowed the body to “breathe.” The wool could never be dyed. In England, a “wool health culture” sprung up, with distinguished followers such as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw (the latter for a time wore only wool next to his skin). Wool underwear, corsets, and petticoats became popular, and in America, so-called knickers, similar to the newly introduced bloomers, were also of wool. For more than two decades, the Wool Movement caused underwear discomfort on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1910, American men welcomed a minor underwear innovation: the X-shaped overlapping frontal fly. And in 1934, men’s underwear was revolutionized with the introduction of the
Jockey Brief
. The Wisconsin firm of Cooper and Sons copied the design from a men’s swimsuit popular the
previous year on the French Riviera. The first Jockey style, named No. 1001, proved to be so popular that it soon was replaced by the more streamlined No. 1007, which became known as the Classic Jockey Brief, with the word “Jockey” stitched around the elastic waistband.

Brassiere: 2500
B.C
., Greece

Throughout history, as the female bust has gone in and out of clothing fashion, so, too, have the breasts themselves gone in and out of public view. Around 2500
B.C
., Minoan women on the Greek isle of Crete, for instance, wore bras that lifted their bare breasts entirely out of their garments.

On the other hand, in the male-oriented ancient classical world, Greek and Roman women strapped on a breast band to minimize bust size, a fashion reintroduced centuries later by church fathers. In fact, from its birth in Greece 4,500 years ago, the bra, or the corset, has been the principal garment by which men have attempted to reshape women to their liking.

In certain periods, devices were designed to enlarge breasts considered inadequate by the standard of the day. The first public advertisements for what would become known as “falsies” appeared in nineteenth-century Paris. The “bust improver” consisted of wool pads which were inserted into a boned bodice. Later in the same century, French women could purchase the first rubber breast pads, called “lemon bosoms” because of their shape and size. Throughout these decades, brassieres were extensions of corsets.

The first modern brassiere debuted in 1913. It was the needlework of New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacobs, the woman responsible for the demise of the corset.

Fashionable women of that day wore a boxlike corset of whalebone and cordage that was uncomfortable and impeded movement. Mary Jacobs’s concern, though, was not comfort but appearance. In 1913, she purchased an expensive sheer evening gown for a society affair. The gown clearly revealed the contour of her corset, so Mrs. Jacobs, with the assistance of her French maid, Marie, devised a brief, backless bra from two white handkerchiefs, a strand of ribbon, and cord. Female friends who admired the lightweight, impromptu fashion received one as a gift. But a letter from a stranger, containing a dollar and a request for “your contraption,” prompted the socialite to submit sketches of her design to the U.S. Patent Office.