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How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution
by Jonathan Eig
Book Reviewed by:The fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century.
We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid.
Spanning the years from Sanger's heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.
The Birth of the Pill is a revealing and thoroughly researched account of the players who put everything on the line — money, prestige, careers — to create a product they truly believed in. Eig’s account is impressive, not just as an insight into a slice of American history, but as a reminder of the path of women’s rights across well over half a century. It’s a searing testament to how much has been gained since — and just how much things have remained the same...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
The pill wasn't an accident, but it was a surprise.
The birth-control pill has been labeled the most important invention of the twentieth century, but no drug company, no university, and no government agency wanted anything to do with it in the beginning. The pill never would have been developed if not for a small group of radicals hell-bent on changing the world.
In the 1950s, it was illegal in most of the United States to disseminate information about birth control.
To get around the law, the inventors of the pill had to be sneaky. They tested the pill at first as a fertility drug. After that they tested it on women in mental institutions - without asking permission - and on women in the slums of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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Jonathan Eig turns the history of the pill into a smart and spicy account of the unlikely bonds that linked a millionaire activist, a free-loving crusader, a Roman Catholic gynecologist, and a maverick scientist.
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