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What I learned about government and sex – Daily Montanan

['More From Author', 'May', 'Lorraine Collins']

Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00

Back in the 1950s when I was first starting out in journalism in New York, one of the other young women in my group of trainees at a national news magazine decided to drop out of the program and go home to Connecticut to be married. She said she’d stop in to see us on her next trip to New York. I was surprised when she actually did come back a few weeks later. But she explained, “Everybody knows why a woman in Connecticut makes a trip to New York.”

Contraception was illegal in Connecticut, as it had been since 1879.

Since I was from South Dakota, I didn’t know that, and the only time I had ever actually thought about contraception was as a college freshman when my psychology professor asked if we were in favor of giving birth control information to those who wanted it. I said yes, so he put me down as being in favor of birth control. I objected, saying “I’m in favor of information.”

I still am.

But now that I better understand the origins of the government’s interest in sex, I realize there is more to it than religion. In fact, denying women birth control was linked to the fear that contraception would allow women to work outside the home. This would endanger marriage and impact male dominance in the work force. This was one of the arguments that supporters used in passing the Comstock Law in the 1870s which banned information about contraception as well as abortion.

The idea that birth control would destroy marriage and get the economy off kilter may not have been a very attractive argument. So, Comstock and cohorts declared all information on such issues was pornographic, lewd and morally destructive. Comstock, through his job with the postal service, banned it all in the name of religion and decency. That’s where the argument remains today, though in the 1990s when I traveled through several southern states, I listened to a radio program in which some men talked about whether married women should be allowed to work outside the home. Old ideas die hard.

Connecticut’s law finally changed in 1965 when a woman lawyer named Catherine Roraback challenged the law in a case that became famous—Griswold vs. Connecticut. She said that marital privacy is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. It was 1972 before the Court decided that unmarried people could access birth control, too.

Catherine Roraback was the only woman in her Yale Law School graduating class and we’re lucky she was there. In a sense, she showed that Mr. Comstock was right to fear what women might achieve if they were let outside out of the house.

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