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The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution - Jonathan Eig
The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution
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3.50 5
The fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was... show more
The fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century.

We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative 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; and 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. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.
8 pages of illustrations
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Format: hardcover
ISBN: 9780393073720 (0393073726)
ASIN: 393073726
Pages no: 416
Edition language: English
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Community Reviews
Feminism in Cold Storage
Feminism in Cold Storage rated it
5.0 The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched Revolution
This book is yet another reminder of how good I have it. I had never considered what life was like for a woman before the Pill. While I had read books about women from before it's invention, such as The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique (okay, before most middle class women could easily get it p...
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