‘Those of us who came to adulthood post-Pill stand on another shore, an ocean apart from all generations before us.’ That’s how Baroness Alison Wolf describes the impact of the invention of the contraceptive pill on the lives of women in The XX Factor. ‘Sex can be safe. You can relax about it. Women can avoid an undesired pregnancy, completely, securely, and on their own’, she writes.
Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders, could hardly be more different from the scholarly Professor Wolf. Yet, born just two years later in 1951, she shares Wolf’s view that the Pill revolutionised women’s lives. ‘In the name of women’s lib, women were becoming like men, and that was good news for me because I wanted what the boys had’, Hynde wrote in her 2015 memoir, Reckless. ‘In thinking we were in charge of our own sexuality, now we could say “yes” instead of “no”.’
