More Details

Summary:

"We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. The Birth of the Pill 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; 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"-- [Provided by publisher]

Table of Contents:

• A winter night
• A short history of sex
• Spontaneous ovulations
• A go-to-hell look
• Lover and fighter
• Rabbit tests
• "I'm a sexologist"
• The socialite and the sex maniac
• A shotgun question
• Rock's rebound
• What makes a rooster crow?
• A test in disguise
• Cabeza de negro
• The road to Shrewsbury
• "Weary & depressed"
• The trouble with women
• A San Juan weekend
• The women of the asylum
• John Rock's hard place
• As easy as aspirin

• A deadline to meet
• "The miracle tablet maybe"
• Hope to the hopeless
• Trials
• "Papa Pincus's pink pills for Planned Parenthood"
• Jack Searle's big bet
• The birth of the pill
• "Believed to have magical powers"
• The double effect
• La señora de las pastillas
• An unlikely pitch man
• "A whole new bag of beans"
• The climax
• Epilogue.

View 14 more lines View less

Author/Creator:

Eig, Jonathan , author

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

The birth of the pill: how four crusaders reinvented sex and launched a revolution [by Eig, J.]

Subjects:

McCormick, Katharine Dexter, 1875-1967

Pincus, Gregory, 1903-1967

Rock, John, 1890-1984

Sanger, Margaret, 1879-1966

Oral contraceptives — History

Oral contraceptives

Genres:

History

General Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 365-367) and index.

Physical Description:

x, 388 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Physical Characteristics:

illustration; plate

Call Numbers:

RG137.5 .E37 2014

ISBNs:

9780393073720 (hardcover)
0393073726 (hardcover)
9780393351897 (paperback)
0393351890 (paperback)

Library of Congress Control Numbers:

2014019355

OCLC Numbers:

869437822