Anovlar 21 contraceptive pill, circa 1965, Germany, Schering AG. Photo / Gift of Dame Margaret Sparrow, 2011; Te Papa.
In a new collection looking at important items of New Zealand's history, Jock Phillips examines a donation at Te Papa
Margaret Sparrow's contraceptive pills
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
This packet of Anovlar contraceptive pills, just 21 tabs, appears small and insignificant. But it is among the most important objects featured, since from the 1960s the contraceptive pill revolutionised the lives of New Zealand women.
Pills were hardly foreign objects for women in the early 1960s. They were the keepers and the dispensers of pills. Their favourite pills included aspirin, a remedy for headaches and pain; and penicillin or antibiotics which from their first use in the early 1940s became the main response to bacterial infections, from pneumonia to ear and throat infections. Also common in the housewife's medical kit were pills to treat children who suffered from worms or car sickness; and also Valium, of which 40 million doses were prescribed in 1969 New Zealand, many to housewives suffering from depression or "suburban neurosis".
But a pill for contraception, that was something new. Until then contraception was a fraught subject and methods were crude and unreliable.
At the end of the 19th century, New Zealanders experienced a demographic revolution as women bore fewer children in part through reducing sexual behaviour. As families had fewer children, anxieties rose about "race suicide" — the fear that New Zealand would be overrun with faster-breeding races, especially "Asian hordes". A Dominion Population Committee in 1946 described contraceptives as destroying "the moral stamina of the nation". Women using contraception were regarded as "selfish". Doctors were loath to prescribe contraceptive methods. In addition, the available methods were unsatisfactory. The most common was sexual abstinence which did little to aid in happy marriages.
Since rape in marriage was not a crime, women had little power to resist their husbands' sexual advances yet had to carry the consequences. Coitus interruptus, withdrawal, was common but unreliable, and also harmful to mutual pleasure. Some women used douches after the sex act, but this was ineffective. The most common mechanical methods were condoms and diaphragms. Condoms were imported by ship and it was believed that the journey through the tropics perished the rubber, while those made of tougher rubber were uncomfortable. Condoms also had a questionable reputation, being associated with prostitution. "Good women" did not encourage their use and they were sold discreetly in plain packaging. As for diaphragms, they normally required fitting by doctors, nearly all male, who were often unwilling to assist.
In the absence of effective contraception, a common remedy was abortion. Indeed in the 1930s about one in five pregnancies ended in an abortion which was an illicit matter, dangerous to the woman's life. Some women used pills, such as Dr Bonjean's Female Pills; others hid in cars in the darkness to avoid detection while an abortionist inserted a catheter; 223 women died of septic abortions from 1927 to 1935. Another response was for women to carry their child, only to lose the infant immediately by adoption. Under the system of closed stranger adoption the baby was placed in the hands of a suitable nuclear family away from the "sexually promiscuous" mother. The child was denied access to information about their birth parents. It was usually heart-breaking for the mother, not to mention the child.
Given this history, New Zealand women welcomed the contraceptive pill with enthusiasm. The pill contained progestin and oestrogen hormones which shut down ovulation so no egg was released. The one week's gap in taking the pill allowed a menstrual bleed to occur. The pill was effective and easy to take. There was no messy "mucking around", fiddling with condoms or diaphragms, in the middle of the sexual act.
The packet of pills shown here was collected by Margaret Sparrow who gave them to Te Papa. Her story illustrates the experiences which led New Zealand women to adopt the pill so readily. The story begins in 1956. Margaret, originally from Inglewood, was 21, recently married and studying like her husband to be a doctor at the University of Otago.
She became pregnant, but was unwilling to interrupt her studies. She realised the medical profession would not help; but her husband knew about the Christchurch chemist George Bettle. The couple wrote to him and obtained an inky black elixir which arrived in a brown-paper parcel.
Sparrow had no idea whether it would work or was safe. She took the mixture anyway and it worked — just like "a heavy period. Anticlimactic, really," she recalled. But she never forgot the feeling of being trapped.
Two years later, despite using a diaphragm, Sparrow became pregnant again. She had her first child, and then a second in 1960; but the following year, "the pill came along ... for me my whole life changed because that was the first time that I ever really experienced good fertility control. I was one of the first women in New Zealand to use the pill."
She had obtained the pills from her husband, who in the course of general practice training had received sample packets. The packet she tried was Anovlar.
In 1969 Sparrow became a doctor with the student health service at Victoria University. She was constantly asked about contraception and abortion by female students but the doctor in charge followed the ethical guidelines of the New Zealand Medical Association that contraceptive information not be given to unmarried persons. Eventually Sparrow attended a conference of the Family Planning Association. This had been established in 1936 by Elsie Freeman (later Locke) and set up clinics in the main centres in the 1950s. Sparrow was inspired. She promptly set up a contraception display at the student clinic, and, despite her boss's discomfort, it remained.
Sparrow's experiences informed her later life's work to improve fertility control for women in New Zealand.
She pioneered vasectomies for men for Family Planning and use of the morning-after pill, and for over 30 years fronted the crusade for more liberal abortion laws. She also set up a company to import an abortion pill which allowed women to have medical, not surgical, abortions.
This packet of German-made Anovlar, the very brand she herself first used in 1961, is part of her Te Papa donation.
The contraceptive pill was not without health risks. The early pills with high doses of oestrogen often brought on weight gain and could cause headaches, nausea and bleeding. Occasionally there were more serious effects such as blood clots, strokes and even heart attacks.
Despite these health risks, the pill's relatively high cost, the continued opposition of some doctors, and the refusal of a few Catholic pharmacists to fulfil prescriptions, the uptake was remarkable. By 1965, only four years after the pill reached New Zealand, it was claimed 40 per cent of married women of fertile age were using it; and 17 brands were sold. Two years later another survey of all women of reproductive age claimed 20 per cent were on it, compared with only 3 per cent in the United Kingdom. By 1975 the figure had risen to 35 per cent. The reliability of the pill and its separation from the sex act won support, and even doctors found the pill an easy solution to contraceptive anxieties.
A generation coming of age in the 1960s, less anxious about economic pressures and surrounded by sexual images in the media, took advantage of the new contraceptive methods. No longer having to worry about getting pregnant was a psychological breakthrough in sexual freedom.
It was not all plain sailing. There were strong battles in the 1970s, not wholly successful, to ensure that when contraception still failed, the possibility of abortion remained. "Our bodies, ourselves" — women's right to control their own bodies — became a major slogan of the 1970s.
But behind that slogan lay the revolution that had brought the pill to New Zealand women — and in that battle Margaret Sparrow had played an enormous role.
Edited extract from A History of 100 Objects by Jock Phillips (Penguin Random House NZ, $55).
A live cook-off featured ox heart, wapiti, wild boar and plenty of edible wildlife.