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Summary
In the winter of 1950, Margaret Sanger, then seventy-one, and who had campaigned for women's right to control their own fertility for five decades, arrived at a Park Avenue apartment building. She had come to meet a visionary scientist with a dubious reputation more than twenty years her junior. His name was Gregory Pincus. In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig tells the extraordinary story of how, prompted by Sanger, and then funded by the wealthy widow and philanthropist Katharine McCormick, Pincus invented a drug that would stop women ovulating. With the support of John Rock, a charismatic and, crucially, Catholic doctor from Boston, who battled his own church in the effort to win public approval for the controversial new drug, he succeeded. Together, these four determined men and women changed the world. 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 feminism, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes.
Author Notes
Jonathan Eig, a former senior special reporter at the Wall Street Journal, is the author of three highly acclaimed books, two of which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. His first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (Simon & Schuster, 2005), won the Casey Award for best baseball book of 2005; his second book, Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season (Simon & Schuster, 2007), was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated, and the Washington Post. In his third book, Get Capone (Simon & Schuster, 2010), Eig discovered thousands of pages of new material on Capone, affirming his trustworthy reporting reputation in what the New York Times called a 'multifaceted portrait' and a 'gore-spattered thriller'.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Eig (Luckiest Man) blends the story of the "only product in American history so powerful that it needed no name" with the lives of the four-larger-than-life characters who dreamed, funded, researched, and tested it. Eig recapitulates much of what's known about the discovery of oral contraceptives and adds a wealth of unfamiliar material. He frames his story around the brilliant Gregory Pincus, who was let go by Harvard after his controversial work on in-vitro fertilization; charismatic Catholic fertility doctor John Rock, who developed a treatment that blocked ovulation and, with Pincus, began human testing (including on nonconsenting asylum patients); and the two fearless women who paid for and supported their work, rebellious women's rights crusader and Planned Parenthood pioneer Margaret Sanger and her intellectual heiress, Katharine Dexter McCormick. The twists and turns of producing a birth control pill in the mid-20th century mirrored astonishing changes in the cultural landscapes: Eig notes how, in July 1959, the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover and G.D. Searle's request for FDA approval of Enovid presaged a "tidal wave that would sweep away the nation's culture of restraint." Eig's fascinating narrative of medical innovation paired so perfectly with social revolution befits a remarkable chapter of human history. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Margaret Sanger, the tireless crusader for reproductive freedom when contraception was inadequate and illegal, dreamed of a safe, effective, easy-to-use, and affordable pill to prevent unplanned pregnancies and the resulting hardships and suffering. The scientists she approached were scornful until 1950, when she met George Pincus, a renegade scientist with the IQ of an Einstein and the nerves of a card shark. After getting tossed out of Harvard as too controversial, Pincus set up an independent research lab, where he took on Sanger's project, which consumed a decade of hurried innovation and rogue strategies. Eig's previous books are about baseball and gangsters, and he brings his keen understanding of competition and outlawry, his affinity for rebels, and vigorous and vivid writing style to this dramatic tale of strong personalities, radical convictions, and world-altering scientific and social breakthroughs. As he tracks maverick Pincus' audacious course of action, including his dubious field trials in Puerto Rico, Eig recounts the history of contraception and the tragedies caused by its unavailability, and illuminates the crucial roles played in the development of the pill by the wealthy activist, Katherine Dexter McCormick, and the compassionate Catholic physician, John Rock. So great was the need, more than a million women were taking the pill two years after its 1960 FDA approval. An engrossing and paramount chronicle.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FOR MUCH OF the first half of the 20 th century, women approached Margaret Sanger with a plea: "Do tell me the secret." They wrote letters, too: "Doctors are men and have not had a baby so they have no pitty [sic] for a poor sick mother." But she had no secret to not getting pregnant when you didn't want to. By Sanger's time, modern medicine had improved upon the crocodile dung ancient Egyptians used as vaginal plugs and the lemon half Casanova recommended as a cervical cap - but not by much. Diaphragms were faulty and ill-used. And condoms depended on men's will, at a time when a doctor could advise a woman to sleep on her roof to avoid her husband's advances. As Jonathan Eig writes in "The Birth of the Pill," all of Sanger's talk of spacing pregnancies and women's independence was for naught without effective contraception: "It was as if she'd been teaching starving people about nutrition without giving them anything healthy to eat." By the time Eig's book opens in 1950, Sanger had fixed her obsession on a contraceptive pill to feed the masses. Along with what Eig sets up as "a group of brave, rebellious misfits," Sanger helped find the secret by harnessing something simple, something women's bodies already did when pregnant: not ovulate. Then, as now, the biological problem was largely solved; all that remained was politics. That was a lot. It still is. Eig's timing is fortunate; Americans are currently fighting new variations on the same battle, one that has never quite receded but, for political and legal reasons, is under a brighter spotlight than ever. It was one thing to invent the pill and get it approved. It has been quite another for women to have actual access to the contraception that's right for them, what with this country's byzantine system of health care delivery and our even more contorted sexual politics. The creation story of oral contraception, along with the social upheavals attributed to it, is not new territory. The life of Sanger, who founded the precursor to Planned Parenthood, is well documented too, including in a 2013 graphic novel by Peter Bagge, "Woman Rebel," and a 1992 biography by Ellen Chesler, "Woman of Valor." Eig, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, brings a lively, jocular approach to the story, casting an unlikely four-part ensemble comedy starring Sanger; the iconoclastic lead scientist, Gregory Goodwin Pincus; the Roman Catholic physician John Rock; and the supplier of cash behind it all, Katharine McCormick. Though "The Birth of the Pill" is more popular history than feminist tract, Eig's decision to focus on those four has its revisionist political implications. When Pincus died in 1967, the first line of his obituary in The New York Times noted that he was "one of the three 'fathers' of the birth-control pill," along with M.C. Chang and Rock. Eig reminds us there were at least two "mothers." (Poor Chang is relegated to a handful of mentions.) Still, at least in the book, this is not a party of equals. McCormick is represented mostly by firmly worded letters and the tale of a sad, if financially propitious, marriage to a schizophrenic scion. Rock, whose involvement in the clinical trials ran afoul of his Catholic faith and who was disappointed that the church never came around to his product, arrives late and generally stays in the shadows of the narrative. Eig suggests Sanger was, by the time of the events in the book, cranky and embarrassing. (She does get the benefit of Eig's excellent first line: "She was an old woman who loved sex and she had spent 40 years seeking a way to make it better." Regrettably, he also describes her as having been "a sexy slip of a woman, a redheaded fireball of lust and curiosity.") Above all, Eig is plainly most compelled by Pincus, whom he paints as a cowboy among buttoned-up scientists. His Pincus is wild-haired and stubborn, given to reckless bluffs, possessing "the I.Q. of an Einstein and the nerves of a card shark." Booted from Harvard for his indecorous ways, Pincus funds his initial research by going door to door to the Wear-Well Trouser and Worcester Baking Companies, and moves his family into an insane asylum to maximize research efficiency. In other words, he was just the one Sanger needed. He eagerly took up her challenge to find an effective and convenient way to prevent pregnancy. McCormick and Sanger's desire was to free women from biology as destiny, to create a world where, as Eig puts it, "womanhood would no longer mean the same thing as motherhood." It's not clear Pincus was motivated by that so much as by his zest for an unorthodox challenge. But he had a decidedly modern view of sexuality. As an undergraduate at Cornell, he wrote in a letter to his mother: "The sexual impulse is to me neither a low, degrading thing nor something extremely sacrosanct and holy. I regard [it] rather as a fundamentally normal, clean, lifeful instinct." Along the way, as Eig shows with due detail, Pincus was perfectly happy to cut corners, presiding over the dubious ethical conditions under which the pill was tested. At one point, female medical students at the University of Puerto Rico were told they had to enroll in the clinical trials and submit to urine tests and Pap smears, on penalty of having their grades docked. More than half dropped out of the trials anyway. Eig also doesn't let Sanger off the hook for her willingness to ally with eugenicists, and to allow their Malthusian horror at overpopulation in the developed world to supersede her politics of liberation. The book is nimbly paced and conversational, but its breezy style can trip on the rails of those politics, particularly when it comes to what the pill, and all the forms of effective hormonal contraception that followed it, meant to women's lives. Shifting social mores are reduced to postage stamps, and though the analysis is infrequent, it jars. When it comes to delineating contraception's downsides, Eig doesn't seem to think he has to prove the offhand and highly arguable claim that in the years that followed, "birth control would also contribute to the spread of divorce, infidelity, single parenthood, abortion and pornography." He also blithely dismisses as futile Sanger's hope that "the pill might lift women out of poverty and stop the world's rapid population growth. In fact, the pill has been far more popular and had greater impact among the affluent than the poor and has been far more widely used in developed countries than developing ones." Contraception hasn't been a panacea for broader inequality, and it will never be, even if IUDs were available free on demand on every street corner. But no serious accounting of women's progress over the past decades, however incomplete, can leave out the transformative role controlling their fertility has already had in allowing women to chart their own destinies. That radical transformation also helps account for the enduring fierceness of contraception's opponents. It is an old argument to blame social ills on too much freedom for women, or on the tools of it. Eig notes that when Sanger gave an interview to Mike Wallace she was asked, "Could it be that women in the United States have become too independent - that they followed the lead of women like Margaret Sanger by neglecting family life for a career?" The year was 1957. Then, as now, the biological problem was largely solved; all that remained was politics. IRIN CARMON is a national reporter for MSNBC.
Choice Review
This book tells the moving personal and professional stories of four great leaders of the birth control movement: public health reformer Margaret Sanger; reproductive biologist Gregory Pincus; wealthy philanthropist and MIT graduate Katharine Dexter McCormick; and beloved devout Catholic obstetrician/gynecologist John Rock. These staunch crusaders were largely responsible for the idea, development, testing (in Worcester, MA and Puerto Rico), funding, legalization, and widespread acceptance of oral contraceptives. Eig (formerly, Wall Street Journal), author of Opening Day (CH, Jul'08, 45-6233) and Luckiest Man (CH, Oct'05, 43-1012), weaves together fascinating details about their families, friends, and colleagues along with important events, restrictive laws, organizations like Planned Parenthood and the World Health Organization, and the pharmaceuticals industry. The book also covers the strong influence of the Catholic Church, eugenics, and global overpopulation concerns as well as popular magazine articles and interesting characters like Hugh Hefner and Alfred Kinsey. Although occasionally disjointed and repetitious, this account is very readable. It is valuable for all audience levels due to its international and balanced perspective. Well referenced and thoroughly footnoted and indexed; illustrated with black-and-white photographs. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Ellen R. Paterson, SUNY College at Cortland
Guardian Review
From the free-love firebrand who bewitched HG Wells to the boldest field trial in history -- via a murky eugenics subplot -- here's a racy, readable account of the discovery that changed society for ever "In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire," wrote the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1969, excited that the invention was already upturning "age-old beliefs, practices and institutions". The bestower of this Promethean gift, and the hero of Jonathan Eig's book, was an unlikely figure: Gregory Pincus, "a scientist with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation". He was an expert in mammalian reproduction, famous for having created a test-tube rabbit, which saw him vilified in the press as a new Frankenstein. With his bristling moustache and uncombed hair, the chain-smoking biologist resembled "a cross between Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx". In the winter of 1950, the 47-year-old Pincus met Margaret Sanger, introduced in the first line of Eig's book as "an old woman [she was 71] who loved sex and had spent 40 years seeking a way to make it better"; her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan described her as "a propagandist for the joys of the flesh". She had numerous lovers -- enjoying, she said, being "ravaged by romances". In 1914, when facing charges of breaking the obscenity laws because of an article she published in her radical newspaper, the Women Rebel, she abandoned her long-suffering husband and fled to Europe. There she had an affair with the English sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis, who wrote that he "had never been so quickly or completely drawn to a woman in the whole of his life", as well as with HG Wells and the Spanish anarchist Lorenzo Portet. She was, writes Eig, "a copper-haired, blunt-talking bundle of energy". Two years later, after returning to the States -- where she was appalled to discover that one in three pregnancies ended in abortions, which were often self-administered in brutal ways -- Sanger opened the country's first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn. After 10 days it was raided by the police and she was prosecuted for illegally selling contraceptive devices, though her conviction was later overturned, allowing her to start more clinics. Her initiative would become the seed of Planned Parenthood, which she founded with money she inherited on the death of her second husband, the president of an oil company and a staunch Republican who described Sanger as "the greatest adventure of my life". Planned Parenthood is now the largest provider of "reproductive services" in the US. Sanger had long dreamed of a "magic pill" to prevent conception and had invited Pincus to her apartment in Park Avenue to commission him to try and invent one. He wasn't an obvious choice of collaborator, but no reputable institution would sign up to such controversial research. Harvard had denied Pincus tenure and, in response, he had set up the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, a private research facility that occupied a family home in Massachusetts. His office was a disused garage and he was engaged in research on, among other things, hormone injections as a cure for baldness. However, with an initial $2,000 in funding from Sanger, he began experimenting on rabbits and rats with progesterone, which shuts down the ovaries when an egg is fertilised, in the hope he could trick the female body into thinking it was already pregnant. Simmering below Eig's readable, racy tale of heroic scientific discovery, and jarring with that narrative, is the less salubrious subject of eugenics. Many of the pill's early funders and supporters were committed eugenicists. Sanger, who had been introduced to Malthusian economics by Havelock Ellis, originally thought of calling "birth control" by another name: "race control". She saw it as an urgent imperative: "The world and almost all of our civilisation for the next 25 years is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums and jungles, and among the most ignorant people." Sanger thought that those with untreatable hereditary conditions, as well as criminals, prostitutes and drug addicts, should be sterilised. "That these views were widely embraced in the 1920s and 1930s doesn't make them easier to fathom," Eig writes. He seems unconvincing when he adds: "she was not necessarily a racist". Sanger held these views long after Nazism made them unfashionable. At a 1953 conference of Planned Parenthood, Sanger told her audience that they should "do something definite about the breeding and multiplication of diseased families ... mental defectives, morons; unhealthy, diseased people". Parenthood, she thought, was a privilege, not a right. She appointed as the head of her organisation William Vogt, the author of the controversial book Road to Survival (1948), which sold over 20m copies, and in which he argued that population control -- a global sterilisation programme -- should become a cornerstone of American foreign policy. If the $2bn that had been spent developing the atomic bomb had been spent on developing an efficient contraceptive, he wrote, it would have contributed more to national security and improved living standards. In 1952, to promote this political worldview, John D Rockefeller III (whose family was one of Planned Parenthood's major sponsors) started the Population Council, which was directed by Frederick Osborn, the leader of the American Eugenics Society. Populations were growing twice as fast in "developing" countries, Rockefeller argued, and this "population bomb" threatened to create a breeding ground for communism: something had to be done. Pincus, who was Jewish, and had worked in the late 1920s at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and been horrified by its embrace of racist theories, echoed such explosive language when he said: "Our globe is facing a threat that could be far more serious than the atomic bomb." His colleague, the Harvard gynaecologist John Rock, who conducted the first human trials of the contraceptive pill, also wrote that "the greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy". In 1953, Sanger arranged for the 76-year-old philanthropist Katharine McCormick, with whom she had been friends since the 1920s, to meet Pincus. McCormick, who was the second woman to graduate from MIT with a degree in biology, had become interested in endocrinology when seeking a cure for her late husband's schizophrenia. He was the heir to the International Harvester fortune and had left her, according to Rock, "as rich as Croesus ... She couldn't even spend the interest on her interest." With Sanger's encouragement, she would invest $2m of her fortune into Pincus's research, allowing him to conduct human trials. McCormick and Sanger, veterans of the first sexual revolution in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, would coordinate and fund the second. Pincus chose to conduct large-scale clinical trials of the pill in Puerto Rico, a nation whose citizens, as Vogt wrote in his book, were prone to "reproduce recklessly and irresponsibly". Despite birth control having been legal since 1937, the average 55-year-old mother there had seven children. Many Americans were disturbed at the large wave of immigration from the country; nearly one in 10 residents of Manhattan were Puerto Rican. In 1955, tests began on female medical students in San Juan, who were told non-participation would effect their grades; almost half dropped out because of nausea or abdominal pain. Another study began the following year with more test subjects, none of whom were informed of the purpose of the study, or made aware of the risks. Pincus deemed the pill 100% effective and chose to ignore the serious side effects, which he deemed psychosomatic. It was, writes Eig, "one of the boldest and most controversial field trials in the history of modern drugs". In 1956, Reader's Digest estimated -- perhaps conservatively -- that 330,000 illegal abortions had been performed in the US, resulting in the deaths of 5,000 women. The year after that, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted a licence for the pill: a pink tablet sold under the trade name Enovid, to be used to treat menstrual disorders. In Massachusetts, where Pincus was based, anyone caught supplying contraceptives faced up to five years in prison, so it was too controversial to market for that purpose. But doctors advised that a "side effect" was that it prevented ovulation. Over the next two years, 500,000 women took the pill. In 1960, the FDA allowed the pill to be properly registered as a contraceptive and by 1964, despite it being banned in eight states, six million American and half a million British women were taking it. The pill was marketed as the "miracle tablet" women had been waiting for (the Vatican, of course, had no time for such miracles and publicly condemned it). There's no doubt that this technological breakthrough fuelled the sexual revolution, freeing women to have sex without consequence. However, there were concerns about its serious side effects, which eventually resulted in a 1970 Senate hearing and a brief 24% dip in sales. And African-American activists, observing how Planned Parenthood were distributing the pill in minority neighbourhoods, saw it as a symbol of genocide. In August 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, Pincus died of cancer; he outlived Sanger only by a year. Before his death, Pincus was asked to address accusations that he was "playing with the lives of women". He reminded the journalist that he'd created the pill for women at the request of a woman. * To order The Birth of the Pill for [pound]13.59 (RRP [pound]16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on online orders of more than [pound]10. A [pound]1.99 charge applies to phone orders. - Christopher Turner
Kirkus Review
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Eig (Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster, 2010, etc.) recounts the origin story of the oral contraceptive"the pill"as a scientific answer to a cultural conundrum: how to have sex without pregnancy.Margaret Sanger (1879-1996), a wily, independent feminist and sex educator who kept her own apartment after marrying oil tycoon James Noah Slee in 1922, was a lifelong advocate for giving women the ability to enjoy sex without the worry of pregnancy. Eig opens in 1950 with Sanger, "an old woman who loved sex," looking to science for a contraceptive that women could control (unlike the condom) and that was extremely effective (unlike the diaphragm). She sought out Gregory Pincus (1903-1967), a former Harvard University biologist denied tenure and pilloried in the press as a "Victor Frankenstein" for his efforts to mate rabbits in a petri dish, experiments that were the forerunners to in vitro fertilization. With starter funding from Sanger, Pincus developed a hormone treatment for rabbits and rats that prevented ovulation, and Sanger enlisted philanthropist and suffragist Katharine McCormick (1875-1967) to fund Pincus' development of a similar hormone treatment to do the same for women. Gynecologist John Rock (1890-1984), the fourth "crusader," teamed with Pincus on his research; by the mid-1950s, they developed a working trial of what is now universally known as "the pill." Throughout the book, Eig displays a readable, contemporary style as he chronicles a similar clash of scientific and social progress as Thomas Maier's Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Master and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love (2009).A well-paced, page-turning popular history featuring a lively, character-driven blend of scientific discovery and gender politics. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Journalist Eig (Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig) chronicles the individuals most responsible for the development of Enovid, the first FDA-approved oral contraceptive, in the 1950s. These are doctor Gregory Pincus, the scientist who founded the research-focused Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology after being dismissed from Harvard University; Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood; Katharine McCormick, the millionaire who bankrolled the research; and doctor John Rock, a gynecologist who helped with research and promotion. Eig situates the four among the changing cultural and legal attitudes toward sex, contraception, and the role of women in the home and society, arguing that while the pill did not start the sexual revolution-despite the book's subtitle-it was a major aspect of it. Additionally, the author examines ties among eugenics and population concerns and the development of the pill, noting the complex and questionable attitudes toward the poor and minorities held by activists such as Sanger. VERDICT More biography than science, this work will appeal to readers interested in popular history and cultural shifts during the 1950s. However, those seeking information on the bio-logical and pharmaceutical aspects of birth control pills will be disappointed.-Evan M. -Anderson, Kirkendall P.L., Ankeny, IA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.