Hormonal contraception, gender and society in Spain (1966-1979)

Abstract

Social studies focusing on women’s health, women’s history and/or medicine for women are not always elaborated using gender as a category of analysis. In the last twenty years in Spain, many scholars have made important contributions on contraception focusing on demographic, political or ethical aspects, but few of them have discussed their results from a gender perspective. These studies usually do not include woman’s medical, scientific, social and religious definitions; the role of women as doctors, health administrators, scientific researchers, and/or health activists; the contribution of women’s and social movements to the improvement of women’s life conditions; the relations between sanitary and women’s movements, the construction of collective gender identities, the experience of real women in accessing and using oral contraceptives and so on. In Spain, during the last years of the Franco dictatorship and the democratic transition (1970-1982) there was a widespread movement towards the legalisation of contraception, prohibited since 1941. In this paper we want to look at the discourses surrounding the legalization of the pill as represented in the press, and at the role played by the feminist movement and the medical professionals in this debate. For this purpose we analyse, on the one hand, the information on the hormonal contraceptives that was published in the Spanish general press, feminine magazines and different kinds of feminists’ publications during the 1970s, as well as in the main gynaecology handbooks used in Spanish faculties of medicine during this period. On the other hand, we will use oral interviews with health professionals and feminist activists.