Did Penicillin Kickstart The Sexual Revolution?
Syphilis Can Be Cured During World War II, public health propaganda worked to convince people to treat their syphilis. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia CommonsA new study argues a cure for syphilis caused the advent of modern sexuality, not the pill. In 1972, the Supreme Court struck down a Massachusetts law restricting the distribution of birth control to unmarried women, and by 1973, 10 million women were using the pill. This marked the apex of the sexual revolution, or so conventional scholarship tells us. Freed from the fear of getting pregnant, women begin engaging in more sex outside of the traditional confines of marriage. But a new study suggests that the sexual revolution began long before birth control gained popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, modern sexual mores may have arisen from another kind of prevention -- a cure for syphilis. As World War II raged,...