The Birth of the Pill

In the winter of 1950, Margaret Sanger, then seventy-one, and who had campaigned for women's right to control their own fertility for five decades, arrived at a Park Avenue apartment building. She had come to meet a visionary scientist with a dubious reputation more than twenty years her junior. His name was Gregory Pincus. In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig tells the extraordinary story of how, prompted by Sanger, and then funded by the wealthy widow and philanthropist Katharine McCormick, Pincus invented a drug that would stop women ovulating. With the support of John Rock, a charismatic and, crucially, Catholic doctor from Boston, who battled his own church in the effort to win public approval for the controversial new drug, he succeeded. Together, these four determined men and women changed the world.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 feminism, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and vividly written, The Birth of the Pillis a gripping account of a remarkable cultural, social and scientific journey

Jonathan Eig, a former senior special reporter at the Wall Street Journal, is the author of three highly acclaimed books, two of which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. His first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (Simon & Schuster, 2005), won the Casey Award for best baseball book of 2005; his second book, Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season (Simon & Schuster, 2007), was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated, and The Washington Post. In his third book, Get Capone (Simon & Schuster, 2010), Eig discovered thousands of pages of new material on Capone, affirming his trustworthy reporting reputation in what The New York Times called a "multifaceted portrait," a "gore-spattered thriller," and "as much a dark history of urban America between the world wars as it is another mobster's life story." And in The Birth of the Pill, Eig again tackles an enormous volume of unexamined personal correspondence in this original and richly-textured narrative.

Chapter - 1: A Winter Night Chapter - 2: A Short History of Sex Chapter - 3: Spontaneous Ovulations Chapter - 4: A Go-To-Hell Look Chapter - 5: Lover and Fighter Chapter - 6: Rabbit Tests Chapter - 7: 'I'm A Sexologist' Chapter - 8: The Socialite and the Sex Maniac Chapter - 9: A Shotgun Question Chapter - 10: Rock's Rebound Chapter - 11: What Makes a Rooster Crow? Chapter - 12: A Test in Disguise Chapter - 12: Cabeza de Negro Chapter - 14: The Road to Shrewsbury Chapter - 15: 'Weary and Depressed' Chapter - 16: The Trouble with Women Chapter - 17: A San Juan Weekend Chapter - 18: The Women of the Asylum Chapter - 19: John Rock's Hard Place Chapter - 20: As Easy as Aspirin Chapter - 21: A Deadline to Meet Chapter - 22: 'The Miracle Tablet Maybe' Chapter - 23: Hope to the Hopeless Chapter - 24: Trials Chapter - 25: 'Papa Pincus's Pink Pills for Planned Parenthood' Chapter - 26: Jack Searle's Big Bet Chapter - 27: The Birth of the Pill Chapter - 28: 'Believed to Have Magical Powers' Chapter - 29: The Double Effect Chapter - 30: La Senora de las Pastillas Chapter - 31: An Unlikely Pitch Man Chapter - 32: 'A Whole New Bag of Beans' Chapter - 33: The Climax Section - i: Epilogue Acknowledgements - ii: Acknowledgements Section - iii: Notes Section - iv: Selected Bibliography Index - v: Index