Review by 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
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times 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.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 5, 2014]
Review by 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
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book 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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
