IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB001567373

Imagining a Psychology of the Pill: Women, Experts and Contraception in the 1960s (2012)

Wailoo, Keith
Wailoo, Keith
Creager, Angela N. H.
Princeton University
Rodgers, Daniel T.
Creager, Angela N. H.
Biehl, Joao G
Biehl, Joao G

ISBN: 9781267783820

Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Advisor: Rodgers, Daniel T; Committee Members: Creager, Angela N. H., Wailoo, Keith A., Biehl, Joao G.
Physical Details: 281 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Birth control; contraception; sterilization Women and health Emotions; passions Pharmaceutical industry Psychology Advertising Gynecology Doctor-patient relationships Science and gender 20th century

This dissertation explores the ways in which medical experts conceptualized the impact of the contraceptive pill on women's psyches over the course of the 1960s. Analyzing journal articles, popular books, institutional archives, pill packages and advertisements, the project traces representations of women through psychiatry, pharmaceutical marketing, obstetrics/gynecology, and health feminism. In each of these settings, specialists invoked the language of the psychology and emotion in making claims about the Pill and its associated risks. Psychoanalytic psychiatrists believed there would be a conflict between the foolproof certainty of the Pill and women's ambivalent emotions about pregnancy, resulting in unprecedented emotional and social reactions. Marketers and those concerned with the emerging study of medication "compliance" promoted a vision of women as forgetful, immature, and in need of physician oversight. Pill packaging aimed to counteract women's noncompliant behavior, while advertisements addressed physicians' anxieties about patients' unsupervised pill-taking. Obstetrician/gynecologists and other physicians worried over the moral impact of prescribing the Pill, and they considered how to manage doctor-patient relationships and medical education as they watched structures of authority shift. The women's health movement saw the failures of medical paternalism and put forth a new conception of women's psyches that called for women to control their own bodies, and critically analyze health information to guard against risk. The Pill served as a canvas onto which debates over challenges to women's nature were projected, and the political valences of the Pill shifted accordingly. As the Pill was normalized, heightened concerns over women's mental states and the moral and social responsibilities of pill producers and prescribers yielded to a broader and more encompassing pharmaceuticalization of modern life. The Pill became one of many pills being prescribed for daily use for a diversity of patients, and experts were no longer able to frame women's interior lives and social roles so narrowly in relation to reproduction. As the terrain of pharmaceutical solutions and medical risks expanded, characterizations of particular types of patients extended far beyond any singular imagined psychology of women on the Pill.

...More

Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 74/04(E), Oct 2013. Proquest Document ID: 1238001645.

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567373/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Kim, Sonja; (2008)
“Limiting Birth”: Birth Control in Colonial Korea (1910--1945) (/isis/citation/CBB000930700/)

Article Felitti, Karina A.; (2007)
El debate médico sobre anticoncepción y aborto en Buenos Aires en los años sesenta del siglo XX (/isis/citation/CBB000831361/)

Article Malich, Lisa; (2012)
Vom Mittel der Familienplanung zum differenzierenden Lifestyle-Präparat (/isis/citation/CBB001420902/)

Article Necochea López, Raúl; (2014)
Gambling on the Protestants: The Pathfinder Fund and Birth Control in Peru, 1958--1965 (/isis/citation/CBB001420185/)

Article Dyck, Erika; (2014)
Sterilization and Birth Control in the Shadow of Eugenics: Married, Middle-Class Women in Alberta, 1930--1960s (/isis/citation/CBB001420273/)

Article Watkins, Elizabeth Siegel; (2010)
From Breakthrough to Bust: The Brief Life of Norplant, the Contraceptive Implant (/isis/citation/CBB001231837/)

Book May, Elaine Tyler; (2010)
America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (/isis/citation/CBB001031593/)

Article Finn, Michael; (2009)
Female Sterilization and Artificial Insemination at the French Fin de Siècle: Facts and Fictions (/isis/citation/CBB001030576/)

Article Elizabeth Johnston; Mary Vitello; (2021)
Reconstructing the history of emotions: Revisiting Elizabeth Duffy’s rejection of the term “emotion” (/isis/citation/CBB509374795/)

Book Kandel, Eric R; (2012)
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (/isis/citation/CBB001201847/)

Article Buerkle, Darcy; (2006)
Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women, and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany (/isis/citation/CBB001030832/)

Article Strange, Julie-Marie; (2001)
The Assault on Ignorance: Teaching Menstrual Etiquette in England, c. 1920s to 1960s (/isis/citation/CBB000770467/)

Chapter Dror, Otniel E.; (2010)
Seeing the Blush: Feeling Emotions (/isis/citation/CBB001221459/)

Article Shields, Stephanie A.; (2007)
Passionate Men, Emotional Women: Psychology Constructs Gender Difference in the Late 19th Century (/isis/citation/CBB000700405/)

Article Alessandro Demichelis; (2018)
Understanding vaccine hesitancy: Cognitive biases and the role of trust (/isis/citation/CBB568141355/)

Article Adalberto Peroni; Gabriele Peroni; (2020)
La propaganda farmaceutica sui telegrammi pubblicitari del Regno d’Italia (1933-1938) (/isis/citation/CBB049008415/)

Article Ferdinando Marinelli; (2018)
Acqua di mare e pubblicità (/isis/citation/CBB592633973/)

Article Bonnemain, Bruno; (2008)
Le médecin vu par les documents publicitaires de l'industrie pharmaceutique du XXème siècle (/isis/citation/CBB000933269/)

Article Thoms, Ulrike; (2013)
Standardizing Selling. Pharmaceutical Marketing, the Pharmaceutical Company and the Marketing Expert (1900--1980) (/isis/citation/CBB001320755/)

Article Greene, Jeremy A.; (2011)
What's in a Name? Generics and the Persistence of the Pharmaceutical Brand in American Medicine (/isis/citation/CBB001230383/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}