‘It Was the Woman That Went and Got Looked After…[She] Had Most to Lose’: Interviewing Men About Contraceptive Responsibility in 1970s Scotland

This paper will examine men’s narratives of negotiating responsibility for contraception in 1970s Scotland through the lens of oral history theory. In 1961, the oral contraceptive pill – Enovid – was approved for use by British doctors. It was small, discreet and stylish, and offered a ‘virtually 100% effectiveness’ rate against conception. Perhaps most significantly in terms of the history of contraceptive innovation, it was taken by women. By 1964, Hera Cook estimates that over 480 000 women were prescribed one of the 15 brands of pill available, increasing to over 2 million by 1975 (Cook, 2004). Coincidentally, the pill has been long associated with women’s liberation and shifting gender dynamics in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the advent of the oral contraceptive pill, oral historians Kate Fisher and Simon Szreter demonstrated compellingly that contraceptive decision-making within heterosexual married couples privileged men’s knowledge and preferences, with women ‘playing down their involvement’ (Fisher, 2000, 2006). They also lamented men’s ‘conspicuous absence’ in oral history research into ‘gendered sexual cultures and practices’ (Fisher and Szreter, 2013): a pattern which has continued into the 2020s. This paper will analyse 10 existing oral history interviews conducted with men born between 1945 and 1965 about their contraceptive practices in 1970s Scotland. Using illustrative extracts from this project, it will show that the introduction of the pill facilitated a rapid renegotiation of power dynamics between men and women around contraceptive responsibility, in which men enthusiastically deferred contraceptive responsibility to women. The paper will critically examine this shift by investigating the ways that male respondents composed their narratives within the margins of a new, socially acceptable gendered archetype, and the extent to which this was influenced by (or co-opted from) emerging feminist discourses of body autonomy in the late twentieth century.