Birth of the Pill

Bol

The story of the extraordinary characters behind the invention of the contraceptive Pill In the winter of 1950, a seventy-one-year-old woman named Margaret Sanger arrived at a Park Avenue apartment building. Having campaigned for five decades for the right of women to control their own fertility, Sanger had come to meet a visionary scientist more than twenty years her junior, with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation. His name was Gregory Pincus. In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig tells the extraordinary story of how, prompted by Sanger and funded by the wealthy widow and philanthropist Katharine McCormick, Pincus invented a drug that would stop women ovulating. With the support of John Rock, a charismatic Catholic doctor who battled his own church to win public approval for the controversial new drug, this small, determined group of men and women changed the world. 'Jonathan Eig's vivid book is a rebuke to all those who lambast the Pill for unleashing promiscuity, family break-up and other Sixties sexual revolutionary sins: he reminds us that for women the pre-contraceptive world was vicious, poor and hard' Janice Turner, The Times '[A] readable, racy tale of scientific discovery' Guardian 'Riveting . . . a vivid portrait of four brilliant and courageous misfits' Daily Telegraph 'Rousing and involving' Independent on Sunday In the winter of 1950, Margaret Sanger, then seventy-one, and who had campaigned for women's right to control their own fertility for five decades, arrived at a Park Avenue apartment building. She had come to meet a visionary scientist with a dubious reputation more than twenty years her junior. His name was Gregory Pincus. In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig tells the extraordinary story of how, prompted by Sanger, and then funded by the wealthy widow and philanthropist Katharine McCormick, Pincus invented a drug that would stop women ovulating. With the support of John Rock, a charismatic and, crucially, Catholic doctor from Boston, who battled his own church in the effort to win public approval for the controversial new drug, he succeeded. Together, these four determined men and women changed the world.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 feminism, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and vividly written, The Birth of the Pillis a gripping account of a remarkable cultural, social and scientific journey

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Pagina's: 402, Editie: Unabridged ed, Paperback, Pan