For much of the first half of the 20th 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.
By the time Jonathan Eig's book opens in 1950, Sanger had fixed her obsession on a contraceptive pill to feed the masses. Along with what Mr 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.
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. Mr 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.
Above all, Mr 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 maximise 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's and Sanger's desire was to free women from biology as destiny, to create a world where, as Mr 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.
Along the way, as Mr 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. Mr 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.
When it comes to delineating contraception's downsides, Mr 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".
It is an old argument to blame social ills on too much freedom for women, or on the tools of it. Mr 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.
THE BIRTH OF THE PILL
How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution
Jonathan Eig
W W Norton & Company
Illustrated; 388 pages; $27.95
By the time Jonathan Eig's book opens in 1950, Sanger had fixed her obsession on a contraceptive pill to feed the masses. Along with what Mr 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.
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. Mr 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.
Above all, Mr 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 maximise 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's and Sanger's desire was to free women from biology as destiny, to create a world where, as Mr 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.
Along the way, as Mr 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. Mr 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.
When it comes to delineating contraception's downsides, Mr 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".
It is an old argument to blame social ills on too much freedom for women, or on the tools of it. Mr 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.
© The New York Times News Service 2014
THE BIRTH OF THE PILL
How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution
Jonathan Eig
W W Norton & Company
Illustrated; 388 pages; $27.95