Read The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution Online
Authors: Jonathan Eig
In 1932, U.S. Customs officials, citing obscenity laws, seized a box of experimental diaphragms sent to Sanger by a Japanese doctor and father of twelve, Sakae Koyama, who believed his new design would make the contraceptives more effective. Sanger and her allies challenged the seizure, arguing that the law was blocking scientific progress and hindering the advancement of medicine. In a landmark decision, a New York State Court of Appeals judge agreed. After that, as long as doctors were involved, it would be legal to use the mail to spread information about contraception or to ship contraceptive devices. That decision opened the door for the American Medical Association to recognize contraception as preventive medicine.
To Sanger, this was real headway. Laws and attitudes were changing. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Sanger opened more clinics. During World War II, she promoted “child spacing” as a way to make families healthier and wealthier. The next step was clear.
The field of contraception, she said, “is now ready for
a fine piece of research
.”
I
N JANUARY 1952,
Pincus filed a report to Planned Parenthood stating that ten-milligram doses of progesterone administered orally had suppressed ovulation in 90 percent of the rabbits tested. The results were good enough, he said, to justify tests on women, and he was ready to begin.
Pincus wanted Planned Parenthood to think of this as their Manhattan Project. Studies at the time showed one in every four American women had experienced
at least one unwanted pregnancy
. For Planned Parenthood to seize the opportunity, it would require a huge investment, and the organization’s leaders balked. William Vogt was Planned Parenthood’s new director, and he was cool to Pincus’s work. Vogt, an ecologist and ornithologist, was the author of a controversial and best-selling book called
Road to Survival
, in which he argued that population growth, if unchecked, could destroy the planet. He agreed with Sanger on the importance of birth control, but he lacked confidence in Pincus and the potential use of hormones. Eventually, Vogt wrote back offering to fund him for another year at virtually the same rate as the prior year.
Planned Parenthood’s response wasn’t a sign that Margaret Sanger had lost interest or given up. It did reflect, though, Sanger’s diminishing clout within the organization she helped create. Sanger had many talents, but diplomacy had never been one of them, and by the 1950s even many of the leaders of her own movement were growing frustrated with her. In 1928 she had angrily resigned as president of the American Birth Control League, the organization she had founded, complaining that younger women within the movement were pushing the organization too far into the mainstream. Eleven years later, the American Birth Control League merged with another of Sanger’s creations, the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, to become the Birth Control Federation of America, which would later become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. By the time that happened, Sanger had moved to the fringes of the movement. She and her husband were living in Tucson, Arizona, where they had built a home with curved fiberglass walls and stainless steel mantles (“
modern as tomorrow
,” the local newspaper gushed). Sanger served as president of the Tucson Watercolor Guild and
hobnobbed with the social elite
. When her husband died in 1942 at the age of eighty-three, Sanger inherited five million dollars. She told her son she intended to blow it all and set out quickly to prove she meant it, giving
some of the money
to the birth-control movement, some to friends, and spending much of it on lavish vacations.
Planned Parenthood had grown rapidly in the 1940s, adding branches across the country. Led mostly by businessmen and male doctors with middle-class women working in the lower ranks, the organization became not only a resource for birth-control services but a wide-ranging health provider for women.
Prescott S. Bush
, a Connecticut businessman whose son and grandson would both become U.S. presidents, served as treasurer for Planned Parenthood’s first national fundraising campaign in 1947. To make the organization’s message on birth control palatable, Planned Parenthood stressed issues like “child spacing” and the Asian population crisis. Changing sexual mores were not high on the agenda. Neither was contraceptive research. The leaders of the organization were more focused on building a powerful network, reaching a broader audience, and providing women better access to already available forms of contraception. As the group grew and gained a wider mainstream following, Sanger became a liability at times. She was too loud, too shrill. Some within the organization thought she was politically naïve, and they thought she was especially stubborn and self-destructive in her dealings with the Catholic Church. By then it had become clear that not all of the Catholic faithful agreed with the Church’s ban on birth control. Planned Parenthood leaders wanted to try to engage those skeptical Catholics by calling attention to the division between the Church and its members. But Sanger had little tolerance for the Church, and the older she got, the angrier Catholicism made her. What right, she asked, did a bunch of chaste priests have to tell women what to do with their bodies?
Sanger also grew frustrated at times with Planned Parenthood, where officials seemed to be “marking time and holding their own,”
in Sanger’s words
. “I’m just as discouraged and discussted [
sic
] as you are—not only about the limitations placed on persons like yourself but the limitations of the caliber of those in charge—to whom you must bow the head and bend the knee,” she wrote to Clarence Gamble, one of the movement’s supporters, in a 1941 letter she marked “
Confidential Please
.” The relationship had become so strained that she could no longer be certain the organization would fund Pincus’s work or any other work she recommended. Proposals would be required. Committees would be consulted. Budgets would be considered. Politics would come into play.
Already she had lost one of her most important financial backers. Throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had donated millions of dollars to deal with issues of sexual morality. He had not only sponsored the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations to provide havens from the amorality of American cities, he had also funded research into human sexual behavior and donated money for contraceptive research. By the 1940s and 1950s, however, some within the Rockefeller Foundation questioned whether the group’s money would be better spent saving lives from malaria and cholera in countries suffering high mortality rates. It was not only a matter of global priorities; there were political sensitivities involved, too. As Alfred Kinsey made headlines with research funded in part by the Rockefellers, foundation officials shied from sex-related projects.
The fault was not entirely Sanger’s. In some ways she was a victim of her own success. She had helped bring sex into the mainstream. She had helped build Planned Parenthood into an organization that spanned the country and improved the lives of millions. But as her organization grew, its leaders understandably became less tolerant of risk. They worried about the fate of their organization if Pincus gave them a pill that turned out to have harmful side effects or, worse, killed people or caused women to have children born with deformities.
They were frightened by the idea of doing something that had never been tried before: giving medicine to healthy women simply to improve their lifestyles. A scandal or lawsuit could sink the entire organization. Planned Parenthood was not ready to go out on a limb, and certainly not for Pincus.
A
S A YOUNG
man, Gregory Pincus fancied himself a poet, philosopher, tiller of the soil, and lover of women. His passion for life and ideas was so great that he sometimes felt it difficult to contain his emotions or to express them in the pages of his diaries. He was tall and handsome with broad shoulders and muscled arms. Even as a boy, there was something uncompromising about his appearance, especially in his eyes. If Margaret Sanger had made sex the guiding principle in her life, arguing that all good things in life flowed from the force of physical love, Pincus had a different core philosophy. “
Our one duty
,” he wrote in his diary as a teenager, “is self-development.” Man’s job, he went on to explain, is to get the most out of his talents and to help others do the same. In that same teenage diary he tucked away a scrap of lined paper containing a quote from Matthew Arnold, the nineteenth-century poet and cultural critic: “
Greatness is a spiritual condition
, worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration.”
It was not sex, money, power, or fame that guided Pincus. It was that quest for greatness, in Arnold’s sense, that drove him. That desire never ebbed as long as he lived.
Pincus was born on April 9, 1903, the first of six children. Genius ran in the family, as did instability. The Pincus family arrived in New York City in 1891 from Odessa, a cosmopolitan Russian city with a booming economy and many ethnic groups. But anti-Jewish pogroms were sweeping Russia, and the Pincuses fled. Between 1891 and 1910, nearly one million Jews left Russia for the United States, and at times it felt like they were all crowded into an eight-block radius on New York’s Lower East Side. This is where the Pincuses settled, briefly.
Gregory’s grandfather, Alexander Gregorovich Pincus, opened a restaurant in Manhattan but watched it quickly fail. He moved his family to a farm in Colchester, Connecticut. One day, a man named Hirsch Loeb Sabsovich visited the farm and suggested that Alexander Gregorovich transplant his family to a commune in Woodbine, New Jersey, and enroll his eldest son, Joseph, at the Baron de Hirsch Agricultural School. In the space of a few years, the family had moved from a thriving but dangerous Russian city to a teeming New York City slum to a utopian community of farmers in New Jersey.
The Woodbine Jewish farming colony was a
kibbutz
before
kibbutzes
existed. It was the creation of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the world’s richest Jew, whose family had been bankers to the royal courts of Europe and who believed that the flight from Russia offered his people an unprecedented opportunity to improve themselves and build strong communities around the world. The Baron decided to devote a substantial portion of his wealth to Jewish colonization. He would give away more than $100 million over the course of his life. Some of that money went to the creation of the Woodbine Colony, a 5,300-acre tract in the southernmost part of New Jersey, where the Baron’s generosity built houses, schools, barns, factories, a power plant, firehouse, synagogue, theater, and bowling alley. All the streets were named for American presidents except for the main thoroughfare, which was called de Hirsch Avenue. By the time the Pincuses arrived, the population had reached more than 1,400, more than three-fourths of it Jewish. The school had ninety-six students, including Joseph Pincus, son of Alexander Gregorovich.
Though his senior class contained only twelve students, Joseph Pincus was the boy who caught every girl’s eye. He looked like a prince, not a farmer, with a long, lean body, elegant features, curled brown hair, and dark brown eyes. “
He was so handsome
that he took one’s breath away,” said one Woodbine girl, Lizzie Lipman, the grocer’s daughter. Though she came from a family of intellectuals and her brother would go on to become a distinguished professor of agricultural science, women at the time were not encouraged to stay in school. Lizzie had to quit at age fourteen to take a job washing light bulbs at a General Electric factory making three dollars a week, while her brother studied for college. Lizzie was as sharp as barbed wire and just as tough. She begged her parents to give her the same education as her brothers but was denied. “
How many nights I cried
myself to sleep,” she wrote years later, “sick with the realization that sacrifice and service were to be my lot always, that all my ambitions and aspirations were to be stifled and buried in my heart.”
Lizzie Lipman yearned not only for an education but also for the handsome young Joseph Pincus, who, after graduating from high school, returned to teach agriculture at the Woodbine school. He was a brilliant man and a strong believer in the use of modern science to improve on nature. He encouraged students and colonists to consider how modern technology might make their plants and animals grow more productively.
While teaching, Joseph fell in love with another instructor. When parents and friends discouraged a marriage between the two, Joseph slipped into a state of depression, an early warning of the emotional difficulties that would dog him all of his life. He left the colony to spend time on a farm in Florida. While he was gone, he and Lizzie exchanged letters. Love unfolded from paper and ink. They married in 1902, and with marriage came the end of their thrilling romance. For Lizzie, like so many women of her generation, a life of sacrifice and service began roughly nine months after her wedding day. In 1903, she gave birth to a son, Gregory Goodwin Pincus, the first of her six children.
In 1908, when Goody was five, the family left the Woodbine Colony and moved to an apartment on Simpson Street in the Bronx near the Seventh Avenue subway, then to Newark, and then back to the Bronx, to a five-story, red-brick apartment building at 741 Jennings Street. The Pincus family joined the Bronx branch of
Rabbi Stephen Wise’s Free Synagogue
, a Reform congregation that encouraged congregants to challenge convention and fight social injustices. Rabbi Wise, an outspoken Zionist, also helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, worked on committees to expose corruption in New York City government, and championed the rights of labor unions.
It was while living in the Bronx that Gregory Pincus first experienced sex, at about the age of ten. The family’s maid, a Polish woman named Mary, “
took him into bed
. . . and did things.” What things, exactly? He never said. One of his brothers asked him if he’d been raped, and Goody said no, he couldn’t have been raped, “because she had a rag around her parts.” If he elaborated or spoke about it again in more detail, no one in his family made note of it.