Alison L. Strayer

The thing most forbidden, the one we’d never believed possible, the contraceptive pill became legal. We didn’t dare ask the doctor for a prescription and the doctor didn’t offer, especially if one wasn’t married – that would be indecent. We strongly sensed that with the pill, life would never be the same again. We’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man.

‘I’m afraid of settling into this quiet and comfortable life, and afraid to have lived without being aware of it’

harles Piaget, the factory worker from Lip, was better known than the psychologist of the same name whom our teachers had harped on about in Philosophy class [never suspecting that one day, the name Piaget would mean nothing to us but a luxury jeweller advertised in magazines at the hairdresser’s].