Pregnancy and childrearing previously served as a barrier for women to enter the labor force and attain advanced or professional degrees, but now, thanks to birth control, women are free to participate in both. Now, the high cost of sex associated with the risk of pregnancy can suddenly disappear, should a woman choose to use birth control or abort the pregnancy. The ease of application and the accessibility of the pill and abortion upended the civilizational premises described above. In 1960, a watershed moment produced an oral contraceptive known as “the pill.” By 1964, 6.5 million married women were using the pill, and by 1972, the Supreme Court extended access to the pill to unmarried women via Eisenstadt V. While this was not the case for 100% of the population, it was the case for most people.Īnd then everything changed. Men therefore had to earn a living and become the providers. Women had little to no ability to control their fertility, and were often pregnant, or stuck caring for their young. Women were largely dependent on men for their safety, financial support, and various other needs. In exchange for the fidelity of marriage, a woman would willingly give a man sex. Hopefully, these qualities are enough to encourage consideration for marriage. Men worked hard in life to achieve these qualities to appeal enough to a woman. Traditionally, the type of men that women wanted to marry embodied all the classic standards of male achievement: educated, physically fit, a good listener, able to hold down a job, a sense of humor, and other qualities women find appealing. Again, due to the high cost of sex to women, they have traditionally only sold sex to men at an equally high cost: marriage. As the demand for sex emanates largely on the male side, women have the leverage when it comes to negotiating the exchange between the sexes, and have traditionally served as gatekeepers. Men are buyers in the mating market, and women sellers men are in supply, and women in demand. This high cost means women must be selective with whom they reproduce, so women look to reproduce WISELY. Women bear the cost of pregnancy more so than men, therefore sex is costlier to women. From a biological perspective, sex will lead to pregnancy, which is a high-cost long-term enterprise. The clock is ticking for women, and time eventually runs out on their reproductive years when they reach menopause. Women, on the other hand, have a finite number of eggs. The child may bear a strong resemblance to the man perceived to be the father, but for all he knows, it could be someone else. The traditional family unit is predicated on the following biological premises: Men have an unlimited supply of sperm, and biologically speaking, can never truly know if they are the father of a child. We are not a civilization of individuals, we are a civilization of families, with the family unit being the foundational brick on which civilization is built. While liberals believe the central unit of life is the individual, conservatives believe that it is the family unit. No innovation has fundamentally altered the premises of civilization quite like birth control. If the two Revolutions are the two great ideas of the Western world, then the third great idea must be birth control. No two events so dramatically altered civilization as significantly, their temporal overlap only intensifying their effects. In The Sociological Tradition, Robert Nisbet referred to the Industrial and French Revolutions as the two great ideas of the western world. A watershed moment produced an oral contraceptive known as “the pill.” No innovation has fundamentally altered the premises of civilization quite like birth control. Traditionally, the type of men that women wanted to marry embodied all the classic standards of male achievement: educated, physically fit, able to hold down a job.