The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig

Author:Jonathan Eig [Eig, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

On March 31, 1955, Pincus and his wife arrived in Tucson to visit Margaret Sanger. Goody went almost nowhere without his wife, and his colleagues were well accustomed to her presence at cocktail parties and dinners after scientific conferences. She was the squirt of oil that kept Goody loose, reminding him to get out of the lecture halls and labs and go see the sights. They flew to town on a cool day with thunderstorms sweeping across the desert. Sanger was already playing host to visitors from Japan, so she had no room in her home for additional guests and arranged for the Pincuses to stay at the Arizona Inn, which had been built in 1930 by Arizona’s first congresswoman, Isabella Greenway, in part to help create jobs for disabled World War I veterans.

Though the conference in Japan remained seven months away, Sanger was pouring much of her energy into preparations. She vowed to friends and supporters that she would avoid traveling and would reduce her workload so she could build up strength for the big trip. She continued to take the painkiller Demerol, as well as nitroglycerine for her heart, but she’d recently managed to wean herself from Seconal, which she took for insomnia. “I have given up sleeping pills entirely!!” she wrote to a friend. “At first it was terrible, just lying awake & thinking, then reading then writing & finally I thought of warm milk & a gigger of brandy. I was asleep in five minutes. I took milk with less & less brandy & now I do not need anything.”

Though Pincus’s pill was still almost entirely untested on women and he hadn’t even settled on exactly which pill he intended to test, Sanger believed that the biologist’s announcement would be the big news from the conference. At the same time, Lader was about to publish his biography of Sanger. With her life story in print and the great goal of that life seemingly within reach, these should have been heady days for her. But since her first heart attack in 1949, her eccentricities had grown more pronounced, and so had her consumption of alcohol and drugs. She had begun gathering her papers and public correspondence so that they might be preserved in the archives of Smith College, but reading through the yellowed pages of her youth opened “veins of sadness,” as she described it. The sadness only deepened as old friends and lovers died off one by one. On the advice of her friend, Juliet Rublee, Sanger enrolled in a Rosicrucian mail-order course to help her learn to communicate with the “cosmic forces.”

Sanger was becoming increasingly self-absorbed. Her behavior was too erratic to make her effective as a leader of a big organization like Planned Parenthood. But she was still able to focus on smaller, more precisely targeted projects, and the conference in Japan was just such a project.

By the 1950s, Japan’s population was about ten times denser than that of the United States. Abortion rates

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