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I would be told later in life by my mother, I was an unplanned pregnancy but she loved me just as much as my brother and sister. Our small gray shingled house on Queen Avenue was purchased in the summer of 1957 (for $12,000.) in anticipation of my arrival. A devout Catholic, my mother’s decision to turn to birth control after that cold January morning was kept from her two sisters who combined had a total of thirteen children. Twelve remain.
1957
Betty Friedan began working on The Feminine Mystique
Leave It to Beaver premieres on CBS – the fictional portrayal of the typical American family is confused by many television viewers as a realistic standard of behavior for men, women and children.
Mike Wallace interviews Margaret Sanger about her controversial stance on women using birth control.
A portion of the transcript:
WALLACE: Well let’s look at the official Catholic position…opposition to Birth-Control. I read now from a church publication called “The Question Box” in forbidding Birth Control it says the following: It says the immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children, when the marital relation is so used as to render the fulfillment of its purposes impossible–that is by Birth Control–it is used unethically and unnaturally. Now what’s wrong with that position?
SANGER: Well, it’s very wrong, it’s not normal it’s — it has the wrong attitude towards marriage, toward love, toward the relationships between men and women.
WALLACE: Well the natural law they say is that first of all the primary function of sex in marriage is to beget children. Do you disagree with that?
SANGER: I disagree with that a hundred percent.
WALLACE: Your feeling is what then?
SANGER: My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases the very finest relationship has nothing to do with bearing a child. It’s secondary. Many, many times and we know that –you see your birth rates and you can talk to people who have very happy marriages and they’re not having babies every year. Yes, I think that’s a celibate attitude…
WALLACE: Surely, a celibate attitude but you agree that Catholicism according to the tenets of Catholicism they rule that birth control violates not only the church’s position –it isn’t the church’s position but they say it violates a natural law as I have just explained, therefore birth control is a sin no matter who practices it. Now the violation of the natural law–you certainly can take no issue with the natural law as the hierarchy of the Catholic Church regards it…
SANGER: Oh, I certainly do take issue with it and I think it’s untrue and I think it’s unnatural.
WALLACE: Well let me ask you
SANGER: … It’s an unnatural attitude to take –how do they know? I mean, after all, they’re celibates.They don’t know love, they don’t know marriage, they know nothing about bringing up children nor any of the marriage problems of life, and yet they speak to people as if they were God.
New York Times Bestseller List – Fiction
By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens
The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier
President: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Vice President: Richard M. Nixon
Population: 171,984,130
Life expectancy: 69.5 years
Homicide Rate (per 100,000): 4.5
