The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (45 page)

In 1965, Pincus published the book that summarized his life’s work,
The Control of Fertility
, and dedicated it to “
Mrs. Stanley McCormick
because of her steadfast faith in scientific inquiry and her unswerving encouragement of human dignity.” In 1966, he sold his accumulation of Searle stock, which had
grown in value to about $25,000
($180,000 in today’s dollars). By the summer of 1967, he was living in terrible pain. His throat was constantly sore and his stomach ached.

In his final days, he sought to spend
every possible minute with his wife
. When Goody had to stay overnight at the hospital, Lizzie stayed, too.

On July 18, Pincus wrote to Katharine McCormick summarizing his latest research data and suggesting they arrange a meeting in the fall. He and McCormick both remained interested in a biological birth-control product for men, among other things. A month later, on August 22, 1967, he died at age sixty-four. He was buried beneath a tombstone that read “
A GREAT AND KINDLY MAN
.”

If there was one problem with Pincus’s invention, it was that even educated women sometimes had difficulty using it. Healthy young women were not accustomed to taking medicine every day. Sometimes they forgot, or they lost track of how many tablets they had taken since the start of a menstrual cycle. Nervous men found themselves reminding their wives and girlfriends, which led to friction as the men wondered if the women might secretly be trying to get pregnant and the women suspected that the men cared more about the women’s sexual availability than their health. After one such marital spat, David P. Wagner of Geneva, Illinois, already a father of four, decided not to leave matters entirely in his wife Doris’s hands. Wagner grabbed a piece of paper and put it on the dresser in their bedroom. On the paper, he wrote the days of the week. Then he placed one pill atop each day. When Doris swallowed a pill, the day of the week would be revealed and husband and wife both would have confirmation that she’d taken it.

“
This did wonders
for our relationship,” Wagner said—until the paper fell one day and the pills scattered. Wagner, a product engineer for Illinois Tool Works, decided his wife needed a better container for her pills and began sketching a pillbox that would also function as a calendar. He took apart one of his children’s toys and began working with a drill, tape, and some clear pieces of plastic.

In 1962, he applied for a patent on a circular pill dispenser and soon after paid a visit to the director of advertising at G. D. Searle in nearby Skokie. When Searle expressed no interest in his invention, Wagner sent a model to Ortho Pharmaceuticals, which was preparing to release its own birth-control pill. On February 1, 1963, when Ortho’s contraceptive pill hit the market, it arrived not in a bottle but in a beautiful “Dialpak,” shaped like a cross between a Frisbee and a UFO. It looked a lot like Wagner’s invention. Ortho advertised the new packaging aggressively, hoping to distinguish its product from Searle’s, which was far and away the industry leader.

When Wagner’s patent was issued in 1964, more than a year after Ortho’s Dialpak hit the market, Wagner and his lawyer informed the drug company that they intended to enforce the patent rights. Ortho paid Wagner a flat ten thousand dollars in exchange for the promise he wouldn’t sue. Wagner then returned to Searle, asking the company to reconsider his invention, saying his original design was better than Ortho’s and would help Searle eliminate any advantage Ortho might seize with its superior packaging. Searle still declined, declaring the dispenser nothing but a marketing gimmick. But when the drug company released Enovid-E in 1964, it came in yet another package closely resembling Wagner’s design. Once more, Wagner and his lawyer complained. This time, the company agreed to pay him royalties. After legal fees, he wound up
earning about $130,000
, not only from Searle but from several other companies that adopted his design.

The pill’s distinctive package helped make it one of the most easily recognized prescription drugs ever created. What’s more, the pill now had a sleek, modern design that suited it perfectly and enhanced the product’s popularity.

Katharine McCormick was too old and isolated in her Boston mansion to remotely comprehend how the pill was changing the lives of young women. But after pledging $1.5 million for the construction of a new women’s dormitory at MIT, she did get to meet some of the young women who would be the beneficiaries of her generosity and foresight.

McCormick insisted on getting involved in the dorm’s construction, just as she had insisted on guiding Pincus in his work on the pill. She wanted the new student housing to provide a healthy living environment that would help female students feel comfortable and secure on a campus still heavily dominated by men. Meetings on design were held in the parlor of her home. Though she suffered arthritis and dementia, she still
dressed in proper business attire
, including hat and gloves.

When the building opened, McCormick initiated weekly afternoon teas in the lobby, inviting students to socialize. She insisted that the women wear hats. Gloves were optional. This was in 1963, when such a request might have prompted ridicule, or at least snickers. But the young women of MIT made a game of it. They arrived in absurdly fancy hats and with baseball gloves and oven mitts on their hands. McCormick applauded their creativity.

A few years later, she agreed to pay for an additional wing on the dormitory. McCormick died on December 28, 1967, shortly after the wing’s dedication. The building was named Stanley McCormick Hall.

“
I knew I was right
,” Margaret Sanger told a journalist from the bed of a nursing home in 1963. “It was as simple as that. I knew I was right!”

If not for that conviction, Sanger might never have persisted in her quest for the birth-control pill. But that’s not to say Sanger was entirely right. The pill did liberate women in many ways. It certainly gave them greater control over their sex lives and their family sizes. It undoubtedly opened up vast, new, and unimaginable opportunities to them. Yet when it came to sex, the pill had the opposite of Sanger’s desired effect for some women; it actually lowered their libidos. Sanger thought the pill would make married couples happier, but divorce rates have shot up since its advent. She also hoped the pill might lift women out of poverty and stop the world’s rapid population growth. In fact, the pill has been far more popular and had greater impact among the affluent than the poor and has been far more widely used in developed countries than developing ones. In 1960, the global population stood at about three billion. Today it’s about seven billion.

Even in Japan, where Pincus and Sanger worked so hard to generate enthusiasm and where abortion rates were among the highest in the world at the time, the government refused to approve the pill for decades for fear that it might promote promiscuity. Only in 1999, after the government approved Viagra, did Japanese officials relent and make the birth-control pill legal. Today advocates for birth control all over the world continue to wish for new contraceptives that might work more effectively in the developing world. But they face some of the same problems Sanger did before her meeting with Pincus in 1950, including a lack of enthusiasm among big pharmaceutical companies.

Sanger lived long enough to see that the pill was not entirely magic. But she also lived long enough to see birth control become a basic right of American citizens. In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in
Griswold v. Connecticut
that the Bill of Rights includes a right to privacy and that the use of birth control was a private and protected act.

Sanger died eight months after the court’s decision, a few days short of her eighty-seventh birthday. In a tribute, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., called Sanger a woman who was “
willing to accept scorn and abuse
until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions.” Jonas Salk wrote in tribute that “
population growth, when uncontrolled
, is like a disease; the cure must come from within the family of man. Margaret Sanger foresaw the danger and suggested a way.”

Perhaps the most powerful comment on her life, however, came from the national Catholic weekly
Ave Maria
, which had excoriated her so many times in the past. In an editorial, the newspaper said Sanger’s “
vision was of a world
in which all children would have from birth the opportunity to be fed and cared for, to be educated, to be loved. . . . Few of us are so hard-hearted that we fail to share her vision, whatever our reservations about her cause and means of birth-limitation.”

In 1967,
Time
magazine put the pill on its cover, reporting that “
in a mere six years
it has changed and liberated the sex and family life of a large and still growing segment of the U.S. population: eventually, it promises to do the same for much of the world.”

Attitudes toward sex were changing fast, thrillingly for some and horrifyingly for others. The pill didn’t cause all these changes; it merely aided and abetted them. There were too many other forces at work for the pill to work alone. The bus boycott by African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, launched a new era of activism. When the Civil Rights Act was introduced in Congress, feminists lobbied for the addition of an amendment prohibiting sex discrimination in employment. Soon after, Betty Friedan and other feminists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). The movement against the war in Vietnam sparked a generation to rethink their methods of political and social rebellion and reimagine the power of the masses to effect change.

All of these social movements of the 1960s were about liberation, about challenging authority, about questioning convention. So-called Freedom Riders risked arrest to fight Southern segregation. Race riots erupted in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Antiwar protests disrupted college campuses. Women were in the thick of it, thanks in part to the pill. They postponed pregnancy, finished college, went to law school and medical school, applied for jobs, and took leading positions in government and the antiwar movement and the fight for equal rights. They also earned more money over the course of their careers.