Dr. Marion Powell talks about early birth control in Canada

An interview with Dr. Marion Powell talking about early birth control methods in Canada.

Duration: 1:45 minutes.

[Title card reads: Dr. Marion Powell talks about early birth control in Canada] [An older woman wearing a pink blouse and a black blazer is seated in front of a gray curtain. She is speaking to an interviewer who is off camera.] The other thing that always intrigued me was that you could say to a woman, go to Eaton’s catalogue and buy a diaphragm. They came in medium size only and you could get contraceptive jelly by that time. But most doctors in Canada learned about contraception, if they didn’t have a benefit of interning at a place like Women’s College, they learned it from the Ortho Pharmaceutical salespeople. And that company, of course, was established about 1941 in North America and all they had in the way of birth control were contraceptives, were diaphragms and spermicidal jellies. And if you wanted a condom, you could buy them in plain brown wrappers, and they were advertised in the personal column. But condoms were not really considered a woman’s contraception. That’s something that men were responsible for, and they were all stamped for protection against disease only. And then the 60s came along or the late 50s with the introduction of the oral contraceptives, the Pill, suddenly it became acceptable to talk about contraception. And the Pill became very widely accepted, and we saw the tremendous change in women being able to plan their lives for the first time. They could complete school, they could delay marriage, and so for the first time, women could think about the dreams or put into practice the dreams that the suffragists had had a hundred years before.