On June 23, 1960, the FDA approved the first birth control pill for use to prevent pregnancy, forever changing women’s lives and choices. It quickly became popular. According to Planned Parenthood, just five years later a quarter of all married women under 45 reported having taken the pill.
The birth control bill created a monumental sea change in the history of women’s reproductive and sexual freedom. Yet, openly talking about the pill was still taboo in many parts, and women outside of city centers often had no idea that it existed.
Enter Loretta Lynn, the big-voiced country singer who has denied claims of being a feminist throughout her six-decade career, while at the same time brashly singing about the daily injustices of married women’s lives (think womanizing husbands, husbands whose advances after a night of drinking are unwelcome, and women who are vilified for affairs while their husbands run around scot free) and offering anthems of women’s empowerment (like overworked wives who decide to throw off the shackles of domestic labor… and wives who threaten to take women flirting with their men to “Fist City”).
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The country star may not be a self-proclaimed activist, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of her music—or the conservative outcry against it. Over the course of her career, 14 of her songs have been banned from country radio. But the one that caused the biggest dustup and became her biggest pop hit was 1975’s “The Pill.”
“You wined me and dined me when I was your girl / Promised if I’d be your wife, you’d show me the world / But all I’ve seen of this old world is a bed and a doctor bill / I’m tearing down your brooder house ’cause now I’ve got the pill.”
Loretta didn’t write “The Pill”—that was the work of three other songwriters. But as Tyler Mahan Coe points out in his podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, “Loretta Lynn’s best songs are autobiographical, whether she wrote them or not,” and in this one her strong voice belts out this funny and piercing tune with an unwavering power that comes from being intimately familiar with the issue. She knew exactly what access to birth control meant for women.
Today, Loretta Lynn is a country music icon whose life story is widely known thanks to Coal Miner’s Daughter, the 1980 biopic based on the singer’s 1976 memoir by the same name. But to give a refresher of the highlights: Loretta was born in the early 1930s as the second of eight kids to a—you guessed it—coal miner based in a poor Kentucky holler.
As she tells it, she married at the age of 13, though in 2012 the AP discovered that Loretta may have bought into the grand tradition of women fudging their age. They discovered she was probably more like 15 when she wed. (According to her spokeswoman at the time, Loretta’s response to inquiries was: “If anyone asks how old I am, tell them it’s none of their business!”)
Whether 13 or 15, she tied the knot at an extremely young age and has spoken candidly about how she hardly knew about sex or pregnancy before she started having kids.
“I didn’t know at first what was causin’ all this. I went to the doctor the first time and he said, ‘You’re pregnant,’” Loretta said in an interview following the release of “The Pill.” “I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘You’re gonna have a baby.’ I said, ‘I can’t have no baby!’ He said, ‘You’re married, aren’t you? Sleeping with your husband, aren’t you?’ I said yes and yes. He said, ‘Well then you’re gonna have a baby.’”
In the first five years of her marriage, she had four children. Add on a set of twins some years later and the three miscarriages she revealed to Terry Gross in 2010, and it’s safe to say that Loretta was well versed in the joys, trials, and tribulations of motherhood.
Loretta was married to the same man for nearly five decades until his death, and she has said she had a good marriage. “We fought one day, and we’d love the next… to me, that’s a good relationship,” she told Gross. “If you can’t fight and if you can’t tell each other what you think, why, your relationship ain’t much anyway.” But she was also honest over the years about the strains that marrying at such a young age, marrying an older man, and coming into her own as a famous singer put on the relationship.
She has always been adamant about her love for her children. But from the day “The Pill” was released, she also hasn’t been shy about the different choices she might have made had she had access to the pill.
“If I’d had the pill back when I was havin’ babies I’d have taken ’em like popcorn,” she told People. “The pill is good for people. I wouldn’t trade my kids for anyone’s. But I wouldn’t necessarily have had six and I sure would have spaced ’em better.”
It’s the kind of frank, honest, and utterly Loretta quote that every journalist hopes a celebrity will give them. But country music wasn’t as moved by her telling it like it is. Nor were many conservative elements in the country.
The record label had an inkling of the controversy the song would stir up. They put it on ice for three years until it was finally released in early 1975 and quickly began making headlines. According to People, a preacher from Loretta’s home state took the pulpit to condemn the song. The song was banned by radio stations spanning Atlanta to Detroit. The Grand Ole Opry even had a three-hour meeting discussing whether they should tell Loretta she wasn’t allowed to sing “The Pill” at an upcoming performance, though they ultimately stayed their prohibition.
But while the powers that be might have looked down their prude noses at Loretta telling it like it is, her fans, the real people who she was singing to and singing about, were eating it up.
Wayne Durden, “the No. 1 Loretta fan in Georgia,” thought about switching his preferred radio station after it banned “The Pill.” In a 1975 article, Durden points out the hypocrisy of this censorship: “I don’t see how they could ban ‘The Pill’ if they were going to play Dolly Parden’s [sic] ‘Bargain Store,’ in which she sings about selling herself at a bargain. I don’t see how they could play Billy Joe Spears’ ‘Blanket on the Ground,’ and not play ‘The Pill.’ Certainly George Jones’ ‘Don’t Give a Damn’ is worse than ‘The Pill.’ and ‘Here I Am in Dallas, Where the Hell Are You,’ is worse than ‘The Pill.’”
Even many doctors, particularly those in remote areas, were thrilled by the surprise hit. What better way than a popular country singer’s latest viral song to spread news of this life changing medicine far and wide, especially to people and places that were hard to reach or where talk of anything even remotely related to s-e-x was verboten.
In the wake of the sermons and the bans, people rushed out to buy Loretta’s new record. A week after “The Pill” made its debut, the latest album was selling a whopping 25,000 copies a day. “This is exceptional, even for Loretta,” MCA promotions official John Brown told Asbury Park Press.
Loretta was unruffled by the controversy. “I said, let ’em holler. Every time they made a fuss, it just sold a few more records,” she told The Chicago Tribune. While she didn’t find out about the Opry’s pre-show debates until after her performance, she later told Playgirl that “If they hadn’t let me sing the song, I’d have told them to shove the Grand Ole Opry!"
The song eventually reached number 5 on the Billboard Country Singles and number 70 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was one of Loretta’s most successful singles.
For her part, Loretta says she has never really understood what all of the fuss was about. “I was just singing about what was going on. I guess people just weren’t ready for it… The disc jockeys would tell me it wasn’t good, but they weren’t used to hearing a woman talk like that. Well, they found out with me!” Loretta told Garden & Gun in 2016. “I didn’t sing anything that was wrong. I just told the truth.”
