In 1964, when I was 14, a doctor suggested to my parents that I seemed likely to grow "too tall" for a woman. By that he meant that I would grow too tall to be happy, too tall to fit in, too tall to find a man.
Fortunately, he said, there was something he could do about it. Soon after, I began taking massive doses of a drug he called "the same thing as birth control pills." The side effects were immediate and unpleasant: nausea, vomiting, leaking breasts, depression, weight gain. My mother complained, the dosage was adjusted downward, my stomach calmed down, and I continued taking the drugs for five more years. I also continued to grow until I was almost 6 feet tall.
Nobody ever seemed concerned about long-term side effects. But more than two decades later, I learned that the drug I'd been given was diethylstilbestrol, or DES, a synthetic chemical compound that acts like estrogen in the body and that is known today for causing cancer and reproductive abnormalities in the offspring of women given it during pregnancy.
The practice of using DES on tall girls had a long history. It was in the late 1940s that doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston first discovered a way to alter height -- a distinctive, heritable trait -- in girls whose parents feared their daughters were growing too tall. In those days, hormone discoveries were heralding a new era in medicine, just as gene therapy is today. Hormones were the miracle that would allow doctors to manipulate how tall a girl grew and allay her mother's fears.
Why would anyone want to stunt a girl's growth? Back then, if a girl were heading toward 5 foot 8 or, horrors, 5 foot 10, not only would she have trouble finding clothes that fit, she'd have a hard time finding a husband. And in the days when there were few options besides marriage and children for women, well, that left an old maid.
Before hormones came along, the best advice a medical columnist for the L.A. Times could offer worried mothers whose daughters were heading for the rafters was to limit their food intake and, for heaven's sake, eliminate vitamins. Some girls who reached towering heights had six inches or so of bone removed from their long legs, but that required a long and complicated recovery at the very least.
So with the availability of the cheap, synthetic drug DES, and the discovery that large amounts of estrogen could push a girl into and through puberty quickly, allowing less time for her bones to grow long, the tall-girl problem appeared to have a solution. An inherited trait that used to be a given -- tall stature -- could now be fixed.
