Excerpt from The Birth of the Pill by Jonathan Eig, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Late one winter night in Manhattan, Margaret Sanger met Gregory Pincus to talk about nothing less than a revolution. No guns or bombs would be involved—only sex, the more the better. Sex without marriage. Sex without children. Sex redesigned, re-engineered, made safe, made limitless, for the pleasure of women.

Sex for the pleasure of women? To many, that idea was as unthinkable in 1950 as putting a man on the moon or playing baseball on plastic grass. Worse, it was dangerous. What would happen to the institutions of marriage and family? What would happen to love? If women had the power to control their own bodies, if they had the ability to choose when and whether they got pregnant, what would they want next? Two thousand years of Christianity and three hundred years of American Puritanism would come undone in an explosion of uncontrollable desire. Marriage vows would lose their meaning. The rules and roles of gender would be revocable.

Science would do what the law so far had not; it would give women the chance to become equal partners with men. This was the technology Sanger had been seeking all her life.

So, in a sleek Park Avenue apartment where long threads of cigarette smoke ?oated toward the ceiling, Sanger gazed across a coffee table at Pincus and made her pitch. She was seventy-one years old. She needed this. So did he.

"Do you think that it would be possible . . . ?" she asked.

"I think so," Pincus said.

It would require a good deal of research, he added, but, yes, it was possible. Sanger had been waiting much of her life to hear those words.

"Well," she said, "then start right away."


The next morning, Pincus gunned the engine on his Chevrolet, snaking in and out of traffic toward Massachusetts as Sanger's plea snaked in and out of his overactive brain. Driving was new to him. He had only recently inherited this, his first car, from a scientist who had moved abroad, and he was thrilled to discover the speed and power at his command. Driving, like so much else in his life, became a competitive sport. His passengers would white-knuckle their armrests and ask why he was in such a hurry, but Pincus, utterly calm behind the wheel, thought little of it. "This is just my cruising speed," he would say.

The 180-mile journey was full of stops and starts. Interstate highways were yet to come; for now, there were narrow, two-lane roads with slow-downs for school zones and train tracks. The long drive through cold, gray towns and hibernating farm plots gave Pincus time to reflect on his meeting with Sanger.

For as long as men and women have been making babies they've also been trying not to. The ancient Egyptians made vaginal plugs out of crocodile dung. Aristotle recommended cedar oil and frankincense as spermicides. Casanova prescribed the use of half a lemon as a cervical cap. The most popular and effective form of birth control in the early 1950s was the condom, a simple device that dated to the mid-1500s when the Italian doctor Gabriele Falloppio tested a "linen cloth made to fit the glans" to prevent the spread of syphilis. Since Falloppio, though, not much had changed. Condoms became cheaper and more widely available when the Goodyear company began vulcanizing rubber in the 1840s. Crudely fitted cervical caps—an early form of the diaphragm—began to appear at roughly the same time. But in the century that followed, little thought and even less effort had gone into innovation in the field. Pincus had no interest in those antiquated approaches. In his mind, inventing a birth-control pill— inventing anything, for that matter—did not have to be complicated. It was like driving. Step one: Choose your destination. Step two: Select a route. Step three: Try to get there as quickly as possible.

Instead of heading home, he drove to his office at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology to speak with one of his researchers, M. C. Chang. By 1950, Pincus and Hoagland had moved the Foundation from a renovated barn in Worcester to an ivy-covered brick home in a residential section of nearby Shrewsbury. "Outsiders have sometimes called the two-story Foundation building 'the old ladies' home,'" noted the Worcester Telegram. "That's what it looks like from the Boston Post Road which runs by the door."

Excerpted from Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig. Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Eig. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.