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Feministing Reads: Jonathan Eig’s The Birth of the Pill

Near the end of his new history of the birth control pill, Jonathan Eig writes, for the first time, about the curious shape of the medicine’s dispensers. It had never occurred to me before that the little tablets could come in anything but that plastic flying saucer, pills popping out of foil as the month carries on. But of course someone had to invent it. David Wagner, an engineer from Illinois, didn’t want a fifth kid, and was worried his wife might be skipping her pills. So he made her a plastic container shaped as a circular calendar with space for a pill for each day.

This is how history works in Eig’s engaging The Birth of the Pill (W.W. Norton). Eig, who is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, charts the creation of the pill as a series of accidents – of circumstance, of chemicals, and, most of all, of personalities. Subtitled How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution, the book follows four larger-than-life characters who are by turns inspiring and morally repugnant: the feminist birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, the mad scientist Gregory Pincus, the cunning heiress Katharine McCormick, and the empathetic Catholic doctor John Rock.

Each subject is a bundle of charisma and quirks and ego, all bound together by unfailing, single-minded determination to create an oral medication that will prevent pregnancy. They meet mostly by chance – Sanger comes across Pincus at a dinner party – and Eig is eager to note how easily the stars could have fallen out of alignment. What if Pincus had never rebuilt his career after anti-Semitic Harvard fired him? What if McCormick’s wealthy and violent husband hadn’t died young and left her his fortune to fund her favorite cause? Eig’s wonder is reminiscent of a child tracing her family tree: what if grandma hadn’t met grandpa at the dance? What if Mom had gone to a different café that day?

The sheer improbability of the events leading to the pill is underscored by the distinctiveness of these inimitable persons: how strange and fortunate that they ever existed! The book ends as the late Pincus’s daughter, Laura, explores his abandoned office and laboratory. Eig writes:

The building, like [Pincus’s scientific] Foundation itself and the career of its founding scientist, had been a study in improvisation. Laura and others who had been there during the development of the pill knew what a close call the discovery had been—how success had sprung, more than anything, from the courage and conviction of the characters involved.

At the end of Eig’s book, which I greatly enjoyed reading, I felt lucky. Eig describes a history of womanhood in which fertility is an onslaught, marriage a consistent and violent progression of unwanted pregnancies. As the book charts Sanger’s work with exhausted mothers of 11 children in New York slums and the resistance the crusader faced setting up reproductive health clinics (including what would become Planned Parenthood), it is hard not to share her horror of a world in which reproduction was compulsory. Understanding the stakes for Sanger’s lifelong work to develop a pill that could prevent pregnancy, I felt grateful to have just that.

BOTP coverIt is this feeling – thank goodness I am 24 in 2014 rather than 24 in 1964 – that makes Eig’s book so politically salient. The writer never mentions any of the evidence that there is a new war being waged against contraceptive access, including Hobby Lobby and the movement of pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for the pill. He doesn’t need to. It’s impossible to read about the terrors of compulsory, nearly unavoidable pregnancy and not feel, viscerally, the very real stakes of contemporary debates about access to birth control. I want people to read this book because it’s a good book, but also because I want them to act.

But there is more than luck to this story. Eig is careful to describe the larger setting of the cultural sea in which his intrepid explorers set forth. Every few chapters he notes the new directions the political winds had turned since his last update. But his focus on a narrow set of characters leaves out the ways that feminists, and civil rights activists, and a whole pharmaceutical industry invented the pill. Social movements aren’t erased, but they’re reduced to wallpaper for the portrait sitting. At one telling point, Eig explains the evolution of Sanger’s vocabulary: she thought “voluntary motherhood” might be her rallying cry, but landed on “birth control” instead. Yet Eig leaves out why Sanger considered “voluntary motherhood” at all—the activists a generation before Sanger’s who coined the term and organized to make this voluntariness a reality. Similarly, while Pincus’s tenacious research is impressive, other scientists – like Carl Djerassi, only briefly mentioned in the book – would likely have come to a solution without him.

The lack of accounting for thousands of crusaders who collectively reinvented sex is particularly troublesome given the unambiguous bigotry and cruelty that informed Pincus’s experimental methodology and others’ support of it. Pincus and his lab had trouble finding willing test subjects so, despite Rock’s warnings, targeted vulnerable population they thought wouldn’t – or couldn’t – say no: in McCormick’s words, the team needed “a cage of ovulating females.” Accordingly, they turned to institutionalized women and then Puerto Rico, where, according to the logic of racism and classism, the women would be easier to convince. One complicit professor teaching on the island told his female students that he would give them lower grades if they didn’t participate in the study. Such disregard for the lives of the poor and of women of color paralleled Sanger’s long alliance with eugenicists, who saw birth control as a way to cull “undesirable” traits from the population.

Admirably, Eig does not shy away from the ugly chapters in the history of the pill, and does not apologize for his characters’ bigotry. He explains the circumstances – for example, the paltry state of codified medical ethics in the middle of the century – without ever excusing the team as products of their time. The book introduces Pincus’s human trials on institutionalized women as a terrible shock at the end of a chapter, a revelation constructed to horrify – and to suggest the author, too, shares our disgust. Yet it is still strange to base a book entirely around four white people who, no matter how liberating their ultimate achievement, either promoted or tolerated terrible violence against vulnerable groups, particularly women of color.

The Birth of the Pill covers much of the same ground as previous academic tomes, most notably Andrea Tone’s Devices and Desires: A History of Contraception in America and Linda Gordon’s The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. But Eig brings to the subject new research from Sanger’s papers and, more importantly, a storyteller’s skills. His focus on a limited set of remarkable but troubling personalities allows for a fast-paced, accessible narrative through a complicated scientific, political, and legal history. The dramatic story built around the small set of characters raises the chances that far more lay readers will finish his book than those of his predecessors’. Given the political salience of this issue, a broader audience will be an important victory for women. Yet whether the wider reception is worth the ethical costs of centering Eig’s four figures is unclear.

Washington, DC

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com. During her four years at the site, she wrote about gender violence, reproductive justice, and education equity and ran the site's book review column. She is now a Skadden Fellow at the National Women's Law Center and also serves as the Board Chair of Know Your IX, a national student-led movement to end gender violence, which she co-founded and previously co-directed. Alexandra has written for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Nation, and she is the co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future. She has spoken about violence against women and reproductive justice at campuses across the country and on MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, ESPN, and NPR.

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com.

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