09/05/2022
On this day in 1960, The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first birth control pill. Before the introduction of the pill, most women were expected to stay at home and raise an expanding family while men went out to work. Nowadays, women can choose to have children, further education and a career on their own terms. Initially the pill was prescribed mainly to older women who already had children and did not want any more. The government at the time did not want to be seen to be encouraging promiscuity or "free love". That all changed in 1974 when family planning clinics were allowed to prescribe single women with the pill. Economists George Akerlof, Janet Yellen and Michael Katz argue that "the pill encouraged the delay of marriage through routes such as reducing the necessity of marrying to have s*x and lowering the incidence of shotgun marriages." Without the pressure to get married, many couples turned to co-habiting. In Britain in the early 1960s, fewer than one in 100 adults under 50 were estimated to have cohabited, whereas nowadays about one in six do.