MEG WOLITZER
Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group, which takes place in the 1930s, includes a scene in which recent Vassar graduate Dottie Renfrew loses her virginity to a divorced painter, Dick Brown. Afterward, he instructs her, “Get yourself a pessary,” and when she misunderstands, he clarifies that she should go to a “lady doctor” and obtain “a female contraceptive, a plug.”
Philip Roth’s first-person 1959 novella, Goodbye, Columbus, details the sexual relationship between Neil Klugman, twenty-three and a clerk at the Newark Public Library, and Brenda Patimkin, a privileged and beautiful student at Radcliffe.
As a novelist, I looked to these works to get a sense of the prevailing culture in the years leading up to the 1965 Supreme Court case, Griswold v. Connecticut. The case concerned one of the Comstock laws that hailed from the Grant administration, calling for the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Objects of Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” Clearly, readers of fiction in the late fifties and early sixties were sophisticated about sex and contraception, which peppered the literary landscape, but Connecticut during that era was still, at least legally, on contraceptive lockdown.
Privacy is the foundation of Griswold. But while Griswold is a consequential ruling, to me it has always had a sepia tinge about it, an antiquated, peculiar, butter-churn quality. People were having sex and using contraception, in novels and in real life, and yet here, still, was this old, anachronistic law, which needed to be changed.
Estelle Griswold had traveled abroad with her State Department husband, and after seeing the conditions under which people in other countries lived, she had become passionate about various human rights concerns. By 1954 she began work as the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut and became involved in the mission to change Connecticut’s laws. Her partner in the mission, Dr. C. Lee Buxton, knew well the urgency of access to contraception. In addition to his patients who were sexually active and didn’t want to bear children, he had treated many women who would have died if they conceived, and others who had experienced multiple miscarriages and would do so again if they became pregnant.
Buxton’s lawyers had filed five cases for him along with a group of his anonymous patients in an attempt to challenge the law, but all were unsuccessful. Though the Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal in one of the cases, it was ultimately dismissed, even though one of the dissenting opinions argued that the issue was “ripe,” which meant ready for litigation.
The word ripe jumped out at me. A question of ripeness or unripeness seems such fitting imagery in this story of women and their wombs. Buxton joined up with Griswold, and together they announced the opening of a birth control clinic in 1961. Nine days later they were arrested, as they knew they would be, and when the case went before the Connecticut Supreme Court, the judges ruled against them. It was only on appeal in 1965 that Griswold and Buxton, led by their lawyer, Catherine Roraback, were victorious; the Supreme Court declared the original anti-contraception law unconstitutional on the grounds of the right to marital privacy. It would be seven more years before the law applied to all couples, not just married ones.
I am drawn to the word privacy, which seems to suggest that corner of our lives that no one can see except the person or people we want to see it. That’s a novelist’s corner, of course, and he or she has the ability to illuminate and analyze all kinds of private material. Mary McCarthy and Philip Roth looked at the private bedroom moments of men and women in their fiction. While there is also an oppressiveness in these scenes, with the men pressuring the women to get themselves birth control so the men wouldn’t have to pull out or wear a condom, that is perhaps for another essay. What these scenes mostly illustrate in a Griswold context is how sex in that era was folded deeply into people’s lives, as ordinary as anything, and that it was necessary for the law to catch up with reality.
The feminist writer Katha Pollitt, who happens to have been a recipient of the Catherine Roraback Award, “given to individuals and organizations that have demonstrated leadership, courage and activism in the struggle to protect privacy rights, the legal right to obtain an abortion, and access to reproductive health for all,” reflected on the importance of Griswold. “When society gets ahead of the law,” she said to me, “eventually the law comes around. The law is very important. With abortion, in the fifties they started to crack down on practitioners; before that they usually let it go unless someone died. The reason it’s so important to have the law on your side is that it can protect you from backlash such as we are experiencing now.”
Most recently, Griswold made an appearance during the Kavanaugh hearings. Unlike previous judges during their confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh would not say he agreed with Griswold and would not say the Constitution offered protection for people’s rights to make decisions about their own family planning. If this courtroom scene were a scene in a novel, it would be effectively chilling, and the smug, rageful character being questioned would most likely reappear later in the book, having wielded his power in a terrible way. But it isn’t a novel; it is our lives, our bodies, our privacy that need protection. The time is ripe.