The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (31 page)

Chang never completely bought it, as his remarks in Tokyo made clear. “
Unless and until we know more
about the basic mechanism of fertilization or reproductive physiology,” he said in his heavily accented English, “to devise an effective measure for its control is only a hit and miss affair.”

For almost a month Sanger had been promising a bold new form of birth control, but so far attendees had heard that no such substance was on the horizon. The audience awaiting Pincus’s remarks might have been justifiably confused. At the least, they were surely curious as to what he would say.

Was there a miracle tablet or not?

Pincus showed no anxiety as he stepped to the podium. “
He was the most supremely confident
and self-assured person I have ever met,” said his daughter Laura. “Nothing daunted him because he always knew he would succeed.”

Pincus began by repeating some of what Chang had said, that synthesized progestational hormones worked effectively in preventing pregnancy in lab animals. He named many of the substances and compared their effectiveness. Norethindrone and norethynodrel were the most promising, he said, and went on to offer details from the studies on humans being performed by John Rock in Boston and others in Puerto Rico. He did not dwell on the small numbers of women involved in those studies, but he made it clear that the findings were preliminary. More testing needed to be done and soon would be. He stressed that the compounds tested thus far produced no harmful side effects in animals, a fact that gave him great hope that the same would hold true in humans. He spoke confidently, his eyes wide under those bushy eyebrows, his hands working the air. The non-scientists in the room might not have understood everything he said, but at least he said it confidently.

He went on:

We cannot on the basis of our observations
thus far designate the ideal antifertility agent, nor the ideal mode of administration. But a foundation has been laid for the useful exploitation of the problem on an objective basis. . . . The delicately balanced sequential processes involved in normal mammalian reproduction are clearly attackable. Our objective is to disrupt them in such a way that no physiological cost to the organism is involved. That objective will undoubtedly be attained by careful scientific investigation.

No hats were tossed in the air. No standing ovation greeted Pincus, only polite applause.

Had the presence of men such as Solly Zuckerman and Alan Parkes prompted him to avoid making unnecessarily bold claims? Had he decided to heed John Rock’s words of caution? Or was he simply doing what good scientists do: presenting data and letting it speak for itself?

The big headlines Sanger had promised never materialized. Pincus’s remarks were greeted with near silence in the press and even a note of skepticism among his peers.

“Promising though they may have appeared at first sight,” Zuckerman said, “I think it is . . . fair to conclude that the observations reported by Dr. Pincus do not bring us
as close as we should like
to the goal of our researches.”

Zuckerman noted that he had studied the effects of progesterone and estrogen on monkey ovaries in the 1930s. There was nothing groundbreaking in that. The only piece of news, as far as Zuckerman could tell, was that Pincus had put the same hormones in a pill. While a pill could be of enormous help in making birth control more accessible, it wouldn’t matter if the substance proved unsafe or unreliable.

“
We need better evidence
about the occurrence of side effects in human beings,” Zuckerman told the gathering in Tokyo. “It is not enough, it seems to me, that we take presumed negative evidence about the lack of side-effects from animal experiments to imply that no undesirable side-effects would occur in human beings. There is an urgent need for prolonged observation before we draw any firm conclusions.”

TWENTY-THREE

Hope to the Hopeless

P
INCUS LEFT TOKYO
and completed his tour of Asia along with Margaret Sanger, his wife, and a few others. It was the first time he’d been exposed for any length of time to Sanger’s world—to the rural midwives and doctors and the women they cared for, to the mothers caring for more children than they could afford, to the brothers and sisters sleeping eight to a bed, and to the local and national government leaders who set policy on family planning. Perhaps it reminded him of the work his father had done on the commune in New Jersey, teaching agriculture to the masses, harnessing science to improve the lives of the poor. This was why his work mattered.

A few years later, Pincus would write a letter to a friend who had known his father, saying that his travels in the Far East had helped him think differently about his work. He had begun to realize, he wrote, “how a few precious facts . . . in the laboratory may resonate into the lives of men everywhere, bring order into disorder, hope to the hopeless, life to the dying. That this is
the magic and mystery of our time
is sometimes grasped and often missed.”

He could not control whether the magic of his own work was grasped or missed. His job was merely to explore, expound, and hope for the best. Fortunately for him, though, birth control was becoming part of a broader movement toward social equality and women’s rights at the time, even if few people recognized it. And that movement toward equality was helping to make the world more receptive to his work.

By the fall of 1955, humans—and women in particular—were asserting themselves more than ever when it came to controlling their bodies and lives. White, married, middle-class women were nesting in their suburban homes and making and raising children—lots of children—just as the stereotypes of the day said they should. But not all of these aproned suburban housewives were happy about it. Then there were the women who weren’t white, married, middle class, or living in the suburbs. They had reasons of their own to be dissatisfied. There were young black women moving from the South to the North and immigrant women arriving from distant countries, all exploring communities that offered new opportunities and new perils. There were smart, young, unmarried women competing with men for spots in law school and medical school. The black women from the Deep South, the immigrant women, and the college women considering careers outside the home had something in common: they recognized that the pursuit of opportunity required independence, and achieving that independence meant avoiding—or at least postponing—motherhood.

In the 1950s, women were
voting in roughly equal numbers
to men for the first time in American history. The radical feminist movement of Margaret Sanger’s youth was gone, but other forms of rebellion were taking root. In the South, women like Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, and Ella Baker helped spark the civil rights movement. In factory towns and in cities, women became union activists. When they married or when they had children and wished not to have more, women turned to doctors, priests, and even newspaper columnists for advice, and they did so without the same degree of shame their mothers would have felt. “Contraception” wasn’t a bad word anymore. Even Catholic women were exploring birth control, justifying it in their minds by thinking this was perhaps one area where they knew better than the Church what was right and moral.

When one newspaper advice columnist in Oakland published a letter from a reader who favored birth control, a heated debate unfolded in the paper’s pages.

“Why, I know someone else who was born of a poor mother, and one day someone hung Him on a cross and He became the Savior of the world, and others became doctors and nurses, and teachers and poets, and lawyers and truck drivers, and presidents and singers—and some of the best darn people you or anyone else would want to meet,” wrote a woman calling herself “
Just Darn Mad
.” Other writers cited their religious beliefs: “A person who frustrates the very purpose and actual basis of the marriage relationship and yet takes the pleasure is cheating God,” wrote one eighteen-year-old married woman who was pregnant with her first child. “He attached the pleasure as first an inducement and secondly as a reward, although that seems a
poor choice as a reward
.” God attached pleasure to eating, too, the young woman wrote, which means that if a woman wanted to keep her figure, she needed to watch what she ate. The same went for sex; if a couple wanted a small family, she concluded, they “must curb THEIR appetite!” She signed her letter “Happy Expectant Mother.”

A few weeks later, a woman signing her letter as “A Practical Parent” wrote to the same newspaper columnist to say that she wished “Happy Expectant Mother” well but wondered if she would be quite so cheery after her third or fourth child arrived. “
Someone ought to inform this young lady
,” she wrote, “that if God intended you to keep producing babies year after year, He wouldn’t have made it so easy to avoid it.”

Another woman wrote to say that she had begun using birth control when her first pregnancy ended in miscarriage and her doctor told her that another pregnancy might prove fatal to her and her baby if she didn’t wait at least two years to recover. “
Can anyone say I’m a sinner
because I selfishly want to live and be able to bear healthy, normal children?” she asked. “I don’t believe so. . . . We are expecting a baby in March. . . . I wish people would remember there are two sides to every story. . . . We should be tolerant of all religions and beliefs.” She signed her letter “A Very Happy Person.”

And those were only the respectable women. Others, like Janis Joplin of Port Arthur, Texas, rebelled more brazenly against the old moral codes. “I wanted something more than bowling alleys and drive-ins,” Joplin said, describing the teenaged years before she became a rock star. “
I’d’ve fucked anything
, taken anything.”

Women such as Joplin were searching for lives radically different from their mothers’. Movies of the 1950s goaded them, making middle-class homes look like prisons and parents look like losers. In
Rebel Without a Cause
, James Dean did in fact have a cause: he was fighting his parents. Many girls were ambivalent if not completely frightened about a future that appeared at times to offer nothing but marriage and children. The writer Marge Piercy recalled, “All that could be imagined was wriggling through the cracks, surviving in the unguarded interstices. There was no support for opting out of the
rat race or domesticity
. . . . Marry or die!”

Margaret Sanger’s recent promises had created an impression that a birth-control pill was close at hand, but young women like Piercy and Joplin were not waiting for something magical to give them their liberation. Neither were they waiting for a pill to let them explore their sexuality. In 1956, Grace Metalious published
Peyton Place
, a novel filled with scenes of rape and incest billed as a story that “lifts the lid off a small New England town.” Mothers hid the books under their mattresses. Their teenaged daughters would find them and tear through “the good parts.” In one memorable scene, town harlot Betty Anderson is furious that bad boy Rodney Harrington has taken Allison MacKenzie to the school dance. Betty gets Rodney riled up in his car, asks him if he’s “
good and hard
,” and then, when Rod is so excited he can hardly speak, Betty jackknifes her knees, pushes him away, and gets out of the car. She tells him to take his erection and “shove it into Allison MacKenzie . . . and get rid of it with her!”

Critics denounced the book as filthy, sordid, and cheap, a likely corruptor of youth. Libraries banned it. So did Canada. Of course, the critics and censors only stoked more interest, and
Peyton Place
became a mammoth blockbuster, sitting atop the
New York Times
bestseller list for fifty-nine weeks. By the end of its first year in print,
one in twenty-nine Americans
had purchased the book.

“I was living in the Midwest during the 1950s,” said Emily Toth, Metalious’s biographer, “and I can tell you it was boring. Elvis Presley and
Peyton Place
were the only two things in that decade that gave you hope there was
something going on out there
.”

In 1956, a woman still had to be shockingly bold to admit in public that she liked sex, especially if she was unmarried. Doctors still referred to sex as “the sex act,” which, like the preparation of dinner and the ironing and folding of laundry, was considered part of a married woman’s household responsibilities. She performed the sex act to make her husband happy or to propagate the species; she was not supposed to enjoy it. Indeed, women who craved sex too strongly were sometimes deemed in need of medical or psychiatric intervention. “Characters like these belong in an asylum,” one
Peyton Place
reviewer wrote, “and, as a security measure, the town would be
declared out-of-bounds
by all civilized people.”

Clearly,
Peyton Place
had struck a nerve. A great social change was underway. Everybody had the fever—“a feelin’ that’s so hard to bear,” as Little Willie John sang in the hit rhythm-and-blues song of 1956.