Cultural beliefs about gender such as women are responsible for delivering healthy babies and women serve men’s needs played a major role in approval and use of DES. Pharmaceutical companies exploited cultural beliefs about women to transform perception of a female body. Companies targeted women from childbearing age to post menopause age that created huge market for a newly developed drug. As twentieth century progressed government and companies could not say that women’s only job was to please men out loud because women became more self-conscience. Therefore, instead companies used tactics of transforming women’s understanding of their bodies and their duties to their families.
So let us consider pregnancy and giving birth. Pregnancy and giving birth can result in miscarriages and stillbirths. However, using wartime insensitive that was a need for healthy nation and idea that science can fix everything pharmaceutical companies told women that it was their duty as women to create a healthy nation. Such situation can be paralleled with our current society where women are expected to and pressured to do everything to deliver healthy babies. In other worlds, responsibility for a healthy nation is put on women instead of emphasizing importance and a role of the government and big corporations that exploit and poison people and environment. So women were pressured to accept usage of DES to deliver healthy babies while refusal to comply with DES meant refusal to be a good mother and not to be a woman who did not want to put chemicals in her body. Therefore, the women’s primary role was and still is portrayed as being mother.
Being mother leads to the second cultural stereotype that was doing everything for family’s happiness and that stereotype targeted women before, during and after menopause. Natural process of menopause was seen as a threat to family’s happiness and especially to men’s comfort. In other words, a good mother would not cause distress to her children by complaining and making their life hard or by divorce. So children’s happiness was abused to serve men’s needs where women were pressured to use medications to prove that they were good mothers and, therefore, hiding their self for the needs of their children.
However, the most horrific cultural belief that allowed for DES approval and use was that women were not capable of understanding importance or danger of side effects of DES. More specifically, women were expected to get hysterical and irrational about usage of DES. However, companies used cultural beliefs to manipulate American society to get DES approval and make huge amounts of money on a drug they knew was dangerous. Unfortunately, DES is not the only example. Cultural beliefs are used today in the same way. Women are responsible for delivering healthy babies while corporations can be unregulated and make money on products that make impossible to deliver healthy babies, that cause cancer and infertility in both men and women, that destroy environment and threaten existence of life on Earth. Cultural beliefs about women are used to justify violence against women, pornography, restricting abortion and many other things. To summarize, people with money and power shape cultural beliefs about genders to acquire more money and more power.
Anastasia,
Everything you say here makes sense, but it is only part of the gendered story of DES. By late 1955, less than a year after DES was approved, half the cattle in America were receiving DES; soon 80-95 percent did! And this was during a time when beef consumption doubled during its heyday, 1955-1972. All of this was very gendered as well. Ironically, meat was associated with manliness, but if female hormones were used to produced more meat, what then? Agency rhetoric tried to alleviate fears, but without any actual testing or evidence. There were some concerns that men were getting feminized and that women’s menstrual cycles were all off-whack, but the only suggestion was to hire older men who wouldn’t be affected by this. What’s important about all of this is that now the absence of firm proof of harm seemed to equal proof of safety of DES.
And then later in the book Langston talks about another gendered dimension of the whole issue: using hormones to make sure that girls don’t grow “too tall.” And then the part at the end about how hormones can act as endocrine disruptors, possibly intervening with the reproductive anatomies of both men and women, again, a section having important gender implications.