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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.
O N E
A Winter Night
Manhattan, Winter 1950
She was an old woman who loved sex and she had spent forty years
seeking a way to make it better. Though her red hair had gone gray
and her heart was failing, she had not given up. Her desire, she said,
was as strong and simple as ever: She wanted a scientific method of
birth control, something magical that would permit a woman to have
sex as often as she liked without becoming pregnant. It struck her as
a reasonable wish, yet through the years one scientist after another
had told her no, it couldn't be done. Now her time was running out,
which was why she had come to an apartment high above Park Avenue
to meet a man who was possibly her last hope.
The woman was Margaret Sanger, one of the legendary crusaders
of the twentieth century. The man was Gregory Goodwin Pincus, a
scientist with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation.
Pincus was forty-seven years old, five feet ten and a half inches
tall, with a bristly ...
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
(814 words)
(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
Randi Hutter Epstein, author of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank
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. T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
The pill is that rare invention that transforms the world… The Birth of the Pill is vivid, compelling, and important.
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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