Did you use the Pill between
1961 and 1991?
Participants are now being recruited for an oral history of the Pill in Australia. If you are willing to be interviewed on the topic, please get in touch.
About the Project
This oral history project has one main goal: to produce a history of the Pill in Australia that in the tradition of history-from-below, provides for a variety of participants from across classes, ethnicities, religions, educational attainment, political persuasions, lifestyles, gender, and sexualities to contribute their experiences, understandings, and voices to it.
This will be compiled using the data collected from a series of long-form interviews with Australians that used, influenced, worked with, or objected to oral contraceptives between 1955 and 1985.
The detailed goals of the project are to use the recollections of contraceptive technologists and technocrats to understand the history of the Pill in Australia in relation to:
Consumption and Control
To examine the consumption of the pill as a scientific and/or classed, raced, gendered etc technology, and a consumer product straddling a supposed gaping divide between autonomy and technocratic control.
Social and Cultural
To understand how societal, welfare and cultural pressures (the sexual revolution, rights movements, migration, multiculturalism, advertising, peer pressure, and differentials such as religion, class, race, gender, sexuality, education, employment, etc) shaped marriage, family and contraceptive decision making, product prescription and choice, and attitudes; and vice versa.
Manufacture and Regulation
To establish how (where, when and by whom) oral contraceptives in Australia were designed, tested for efficacy, safety, acceptability, and failure, altered, refined, and regulated. And to investigate how official and unofficial regulatory channels and agencies, policies and procedure shaped conceptions of oral contraceptive effectiveness, responsibility, and oversight (for both technocrats and technologists).
Logistics and Consequences
To explore the logistics of oral contraceptive access and use over the course of these seminal decades to understand how the techno-social decisions and practices came to be understood, applied, routinised and or accepted/rejected by both technologists and technocrats.