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How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution
W.W. Norton
October 2014
On Sale: October 13, 2014
400 pages
ISBN: 0393073726
EAN: 9780393073720
Kindle: B00J8R3T6I
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
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.
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