‘The Pill’: Loretta Lynn and the bravest country hit of all time
There’s never really been a time when a female artist has had total carte blanche to talk about being a woman.
It’s somewhat more accepted these days by most audiences, and even then, talk too honestly about misogyny and the patriarchy, and you’ll be tarred with being a humourless scold. Talk too honestly about your own shortcomings and you’ll be labelled a “bad feminist”, or about the joys of femininity and you’ll be labelled a vacuous bimbo. To be clear, this is far from an issue in music either; this is just part of the joys of being a woman.
Yet, to say that in 2025 nothing’s changed is a little churlish. It cheapens the tireless work that feminists have achieved in the past, and truly, if we think it’s bad now, it’s got nothing on the 1970s. To go into the specifics of that would require much more time, space and research than I have now, but one of the best examples of this comes from the pen of one of the great country stars of that day, Loretta Lynn, a woman perpetually ahead of her time.
By the late 1960s, Lynn was firmly one of the top country stars around. Her 1966 hit ‘You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)’ made her the first female artist to top the Billboard country charts, and from there, she just kept climbing. It wasn’t just her voice – she was proving herself as a sharp, honest songwriter too. Her wit and way of telling her own story won over fans far beyond the Nashville crowd. And by the early ’70s, she was starting to really push the envelope, seeing just how far she could go as a woman in the industry.
What did Loretta Lynn do next?
In 1972, Lynn wrote a little song called ‘The Pill’, and if you haven’t heard the song, it’s about exactly what it sounds like: a spirited, hilarious love letter to the birth control pill.
Specifically, it’s about the agency it gives women to live their own lives and how it allows women to circumnavigate shitty men that would otherwise leave them with an unwanted child as they go on their merry way. Now, a song celebrating a contraceptive this explicitly would cause certain parts of the media sphere in 2025 to have kittens, so one can only imagine how it would have gone down in 1972.
Her record label was one of the many people worrying about this, encouraging Lynn to shelve the song and sit on it before releasing it, to which she agreed, but a fire had been lit underneath her. She scored another hit single the following year with ‘Rated X’, a similarly frank song about the reality of life as a divorced woman, and perhaps inspired by how well ‘Rated X’ had been received, despite its subject matter, she pushed for the release of ‘The Pill’. With her label presumably quaking in their boots, it was released in 1975, and, initially, all their fears were justified.
The song was banned from most country stations and country charts, yet that lead to one heck of a twist. Sure, it couldn’t reach the country sphere, so instead, it went straight to the pop charts, with ‘The Pill’ ending up breaching the Billboard Hot 100 at number 70, Lynn’s highest ever appearance on the biggest chart in music.
Loretta Lynn is nothing if not a complicated character filled with contradictions, but the bravery it took to write those songs at that time is commendable; it’s a good thing that so many artists are following her lead to this day, no matter the response.
