Excerpt from The Birth of the Pill by Jonathan Eig, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Pincus knew about Sanger. Almost everyone in America did. It was Sanger who had popularized the term "birth control" and almost single-handedly launched the movement for contraceptive rights in the United States. Women would never gain equality, she had argued, until they were freed from sexual servitude. Sanger had opened the nation's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 and helped launch dozens more around the world. But even after decades of work, the contraceptive devices available at those clinics—condoms and cervical caps, mostly—remained ineffective, impractical, or difficult to obtain. It was as if she'd been teaching starving people about nutrition without giving them anything healthy to eat. Sanger explained to Pincus that she was looking for an inexpensive, easy-to-use, and completely foolproof method of contraception, preferably a pill. It should be something biological, she said, something a woman could swallow every morning with her orange juice or while brushing her teeth, with or without the consent of the man with whom she was sleeping; something that would make sexual intercourse spontaneous, with no forethought or messy fumbling, no sacrifice of pleasure; something that would not affect a woman's fertility if she wished to have children later in life; something that would work everywhere from the slums of New York to the jungles of southeast Asia; something 100 percent effective.

Could it be done?

The other scientists she'd approached, every one of them, had said no, and they had given her a long list of reasons. It was dirty, disreputable work. The technology wasn't there. And even if it somehow could be done, there would be no point. Thirty states and the federal government still had anti-birth-control laws on the books. Why go to the trouble of making a pill no drug company would dare to manufacture and no doctor would dare prescribe?

But Sanger held out hope that Gregory Pincus was different, that he might be bold enough—or desperate enough—to try.


It was the midpoint of the century. Scientists were taking up matters of life and death that once had been the domain principally of artists and philosophers. Men in lab coats—and yes, they were almost all men—were heroes, winners of wars, battlers of disease, givers of life. Malaria, tuberculosis, and syphilis were among the many illnesses surrendering to modern medicine. Governments and giant corporations poured unprecedented sums of money into research, sponsoring everything from high school science clubs to cold fusion exploration. Health became a political issue as well as a social one. World War II had scarred the earth but also transformed it, offering the promise of a better, freer world, and scientists were leading the way.

Americans were settling into new suburban box homes and exploring the joys of lawn care, dry martinis, and I Love Lucy. At least to the casual observer, the United States in the early 1950s appeared staid and steadfast. The Andrews Sisters sang "I Wanna Be Loved" and John Wayne starred in Sands of Iwo Jima, celebrating the nation's military might and commitment to democratic ideals.

It was a glorious time to be an American. Young men returning from battle were looking for new adventures and new ways to feel like heroes as they adjusted to the dullness of their homes, marriages, and jobs. During the war, new rules of morality had applied. Sex had become a more casual endeavor as foreign women traded their bodies to American soldiers for cigarettes and cash. Girlfriends back home had written steamy letters filled with promises of the great passion awaiting their men. In truth, many of the women back home had been exploring their own new moral standards. The war had thrust women into the workplace, putting money in their pockets and liberating them from their parental homes. They'd begun dating and making love to men they did not intend to marry, experimenting with new ideas about intimacy and commitment. In 1948, a college professor in Indiana named Alfred Charles Kinsey published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, to be followed five years later by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, and found that people were much friskier than they cared to admit, with 85 percent confessing to premarital sex, 50 percent acknowledging extramarital affairs, and almost everyone saying they masturbated. It would turn out that Kinsey was perhaps biased in his conclusions, but the impact of his work was nevertheless profound. In 1949, Hugh Hefner, a graduate student in sociology at Northwestern University, read Kinsey's report and wrote a term paper arguing for an end to the repression of sex and sexuality in America. "Let us see if we cannot begin to find our way out of this dark, emotional, taboo-ridden labyrinth and into the fresh air and light of reason," Hefner wrote, as he began preparing to do something about it personally.

Excerpted from Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig. Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Eig. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.