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Gytha - The Women's Dr Gytha Betheras well remembers the first six packets of the contraceptive pill that arrived in Melbourne. Rare and full of mystique, the precious imports were locked away by her superiors.
| In the late 1950s, when even married couples were denied effective contraception, Betheras glimpsed in the little pills the beginnings of a sexual revolution. The strictly governed field of obstetrics and gynaecology rarely offered reliable contraceptive advice — this was confined to those whose health would be endangered by pregnancy. Others relied on prayer, and techniques ranging from the rhythm method, abstinence and withdrawal, to condoms and sea sponges. Yet a decade or so later, Australians would be the world's highest per capita users of the Pill.
"When I was a medical student, sex was just the M or F box you ticked on a form," Betheras says. "There was such a lack of knowledge and anxiety about being safe. Many people thought the young shouldn't have contraception. They saw it as a licence to misbehave."
She thought otherwise. Her own study of 200 pregnant girls under 18 in the late '60s proved to herself and colleagues that the young women had no idea how to get advice.
"It made me sympathetic to that age group," she says.
In the past 50 years, Betheras' career has spanned a huge moral, medical and ethical arc, from the days when husbands were banned from delivery rooms, to an era of birth centres with patients in control, and as many partners, mothers and doulas as they can muster.
A former president of the Royal Women's Hospital, she was a pioneer in family planning and sexual counselling. At 78, she still practises as a sexual counsellor for a few long-term patients. And in a very proper eastern suburbs home, it's surprisingly easy — even for a visitor who would never dream of talking sex with her parents — to talk about positions and dangly bits with this grandmother who, frankly, has seen and heard it all.
Her greatest satisfaction was the couple she'd counselled after they'd not once had intercourse in their 11-year marriage. Bumping into them years later, Betheras found the wife now a mother, with two children conceived naturally.
Her greatest sadness: one of her earliest cases, at medical school in Queensland. A pregnant 13-year-old year had been brought by her mother from Cairns to give birth in Brisbane, far from the locals' censure. "This girl was so brave, so good during the delivery of her baby, and I wondered how she could be. She told me, 'My mother said if there were other women in the ward and I cried out, I'd upset them'.
"This made me so angry, as the other women all bellowed, and she'd really been so brave. Afterwards, the baby was whipped away from her to be adopted. This had been agreed upon. But it was then that she cried. She told me, 'Mother said I'd want to keep my baby, and I do'.
"We all just wept, even a midwife who I'd thought was so tough. Of course when contraception came in and terminations became legal and accessible, these young women had a choice."
Deeply affected by such experiences, Betheras realised she could play a role in the huge social changes that must lie ahead. First, she had to carve her own path among predominantly male doctors. Betheras had arrived at medical school in Brisbane after a dramatic childhood of new frontiers, and secret voyages during World War II.
Her father, an oilfield geologist from Yorkshire, journeyed to Texas, where he met and married Betheras' mother. Their daughter was born in Mississippi, and given an old English name shared by King Canute's niece.
The Australian connection began when the well-known Durack clan invited her father to search for oil in the Kimberley. The family came out to Perth, then Canberra and Brisbane, but when Betheras' mother became ill during the war, they made a risky sea voyage back to the United States, "zigzagging across the Pacific in 1942," she remembers.
By 1947, she was back, and studying medicine at the University of Queensland. Women made up only about 10% of the group, as many ex-servicemen were encouraged to enrol. "The women's hospital in Brisbane didn't even have a bathroom for women," says Betheras. "But I was lucky, I got a post in gynaecology and was on my way."
Melbourne's Queen Victoria Hospital was a trailblazer for female doctors of the time, so Betheras came south to maximise her opportunities. In 1957, she moved to the Royal Women's Hospital. In her view, both institutions brought about some of the most brave and enlightened reforms in women's health.
For many Victorian women, however, advice still seemed hard to find, and the number of babies offered for adoption continued to grow. In 1971, the hospital board invited Betheras to head a Family Planning Clinic. Her staff of female doctors became known as Gytha's girls, according to Janet McCalman's history of the hospital, Sex and Suffering. The clinic very quickly had an impact; birth rates at the hospital plummeted.
Single women would perhaps benefit most. As young people travelled and attended university in ever greater numbers in the 1970s, sexual freedom blossomed. In the summer of love, many doctors and nurses realised they must risk controversy to meet their obligations to patients.
At first mention of the word feminist, Betheras frowns slightly, pauses to consider how, or if, a single label can properly describe 50 years of quiet determination. While she was at the eye of the storm when the hospital made its most audacious decisions — opening a sexual counselling clinic, and making abortion available to public patients — Betheras says she was completely apolitical. She did not feel herself an activist fighting a public relations war. Her motivation was a slow burn. Practical, deeply ethical, she simply believed women should make their own decisions about their bodies. She might not care for the label, but like many of her generation of strong-willed but modest professional women, she's probably best described as a proto-feminist.When she married Rex Betheras, a leading neo-natal specialist with a punishing work schedule, she decided to shape her own career around family planning and counselling, while raising her two children.
"What I always wanted was for women to have an equal chance in this field, and to give women choices. Women have biological needs, that change your life."
The mid-'70s controversy over terminations riles her to this day. "It was a traumatic time, because there was so much opposition. The Right to Life people would come into the hospital's foyer, even up to theatre, and look at names on theatre lists.
"No one is asked, invited, encouraged to have an abortion. My view was if women wanted to talk about it, they should have been able to. They saw a social worker as well as a doctor. They always had a choice."
Much of the public, and some in the media weren't quite ready for women not just burning bras but popping the Pill, terminating their pregnancies and seeking help for problematic sex lives. It was a volatile time, when doctors who wanted to educate couples, single people, teachers, even school students about sex, scandalised conservatives in the community. Betheras and her ilk also faced some resistance within the hospital to progressive ideas. Nevertheless, in 1977, the mood went her way when the hospital opened a sexual counselling clinic.
"The first to come in were women who had no libido, or had had no orgasms. I would recommend a book then called Becoming Orgasmic. They could look for it in sex shops, but I told them they'd also find it in Myer."
Perhaps surprisingly, some difficulties for couples haven't changed at all. In our sex lives we were, and still are, simply too tired. The DINKS (double income no kids) have been joined by the DINS (double income no sex), she told McCalman; all "working like demons and suddenly the fun's gone out of the relationship — all pressure and no relaxation".
Women now easily access family planning advice by visiting their doctor. Betheras formally left the hospital in 1995, but as her 80s near, remains a demure but proud custodian of the sexual revolution.
| Read more news and stories from the Women's in our Community Newsletter.
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