America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (3 page)

As the women’s rights movement gained momentum in the early twentieth century, activists demanded not only the vote but also equality in marriage, access to divorce, and the right to engage in or refuse sex and reproduction. The birth control movement emerged as part of this wide-ranging feminist agenda. Both Sanger and McCormick began their careers as women’s rights activists during this time. At that point, birth control advocates promoted contraception as a radical idea linked to political change as well as personal emancipation.
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Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick were part of this movement for radical change. Their dream for a contraceptive that would be entirely controlled by women emerged at this time. Sanger, a feisty socialist and militant feminist, came from a working-class background. Her radicalism drew on her roots. Writing in
The Woman Rebel
, a periodical she began publishing in 1914, she declared, “The working class can use direct action by refusing to supply the market with children to be exploited, by refusing to populate the earth with slaves.”
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Sanger coined the term “birth control” in 1915, and within a few years she as- serted her leadership of the movement that would be her driv- ing passion for the rest of her life.
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Sanger’s woman-centered approach to contraception emerged directly from her personal experience. The sixth of eleven chil- dren born to Irish Catholic immigrant parents, she watched her mother weaken and die at the age of fifty. She blamed her mother’s premature death on constant childbearing and lack of access to contraceptives. Working as a nurse, Sanger also en- countered many women who became sick and died from illegal abortions or, like her mother, simply having too many children.

She also considered contraception necessary to ease fears of pregnancy so that women could enjoy sex. Margaret Sanger expressed her hopes for a “magic pill” to prevent pregnancy as early as 1912 when she was thirty-three years old.
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But Sanger’s advocacy of birth control was thwarted by legal restrictions, especially the Comstock Law. Along with many other birth controllers, Sanger challenged the law in several acts of civil disobedience. During these years, at least twenty birth control activists went to prison on federal charges.
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Sanger was first arrested in 1914 for promoting contraceptives in
The Woman Rebel
. Rather than face incarceration, she fled the coun- try and spent the next two years in Europe. While she was away, her husband, William Sanger, was arrested for distribut- ing “Family Limitation,” a birth control pamphlet written by his wife. In a raucous courtroom scene, William Sanger con- fronted Anthony Comstock as the assembled crowd of Sanger’s supporters—including a number of well-known socialists and anarchists—hooted, jeered, and shouted at Comstock and the judge until the rowdy spectators were removed from the court- room. The judge convicted Sanger, declaring the pamphlet “immoral and indecent,” and scolded, “Such persons as you who circulate such pamphlets are a menace to society. There are too many now who believe it is a crime to have children. If some of the women who are going around and advocating equal suffrage would go around and advocate women having children they would do a greater service.”
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In 1916, Margaret Sanger returned to face her own trial, and went to prison for opening the first birth control clinic in the United States. Although her clinic was in violation of the law,

her strategy was to work with doctors to lend her movement le- gitimacy. That strategy served her well in the long run. After her release, she challenged the law that prohibited the distribu- tion of birth control information. Although her conviction was upheld on appeal in 1918, Judge Frederick E. Crane provided for a medical exception to the law that allowed physicians to offer contraceptive advice to married women for the “cure and prevention of disease.” With this new loophole in the system, Sanger promoted the establishment of birth control clinics across the country to be staffed by physicians who could legally provide contraceptive information and devices. She challenged the law again in 1936 in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The case,
United States v. One Package
, allowed physicians to send contraceptives through the mail, effectively removing birth con- trol from Comstock Law prohibitions.

To promote her crusade for birth control, Sanger compro- mised her initial radical socialist principles. In the 1920s, she forged ties with medical professionals, including promoters of eugenics, whose conservative politics embraced immigration restriction and advocacy of laws for the sterilization of the “unfit.” She continued to work closely with these physicians as a way to gain legitimacy for the birth control movement. By 1935, when most birth control advocates were strong New Deal liberals, Sanger attacked Franklin Roosevelt for his am- bivalence about birth control using eugenic arguments: “As long as the procreative instinct is allowed to run reckless riot through our social structure . . . as long as the New Deal and our paternalistic Administration refuse to recognize [the dan- ger this poses], grandiose schemes for security may eventually

turn into subsidies for the perpetuation of the irresponsible classes of society.”
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By this time, the birth control movement had already gained considerable mainstream acceptance and had lost its radical edge. With the lifting of Comstock Law restrictions and the need to limit family size during the Great Depression, the number of birth control clinics in the nation grew from fifty-five in 1930 to more than eight hundred in 1942. In that year, the Birth Control Federation of America changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), signaling a major shift in the movement’s direction. New goals included strengthening the family by making it possible to plan the timing and spacing of children and by lib- erating female sexuality in marriage, leading to happier couples and greater domestic contentment. Improvements in barrier methods, including the condom and the diaphragm, increased the effectiveness of these contraceptives.
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By the 1950s, the promise of women’s emancipation faded as the goal of family harmony came to the fore. Contraception was no longer part of a wide-ranging feminist agenda. In fact, Sanger had become an outspoken advocate of population con- trol and family planning. As she wrote to Katharine Mc- Cormick, “I consider that the world and almost our civilization for the next twenty-five years, is going to depend upon a sim- ple, cheap, safe, contraceptive to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people. I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being en- couraged to breed and would die out were the government not

feeding them.”
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She still promoted the idea of a simple con- traceptive that would be entirely controlled by women, but held to the belief that the medical profession should regulate and dispense contraceptives. A birth control pill, which she first imagined in 1912, remained her ultimate goal.

That dream became a reality as a result of Sanger’s partner- ship with Katharine Dexter McCormick. Brilliant, dedicated, and passionate, McCormick was a courageous lifelong activist on behalf of women’s rights. The two ardent feminists first met in Boston in 1917 at one of Sanger’s lectures, and they quickly became friends. In contrast to Sanger’s modest economic cir- cumstances, Katharine Dexter was born into wealth. The child of a successful Chicago lawyer, Katharine had advantages few young women of her generation enjoyed. She was the second woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology (MIT). Later she became an active alumna who pushed the school to admit more women. When it became clear that fe- male students at MIT needed an appropriate living space, she funded the construction of a women’s dorm. Challenging the status quo at every turn, she hosted dinners for MIT’s female students and lectured them on the importance of birth control— a particularly bold move at a time when contraception was not only socially taboo but also illegal in Massachusetts.
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In 1904, the year she graduated from college, Katharine Dexter married Stanley McCormick, son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper and founder of International Harvester Company. Soon after their marriage Stanley was diagnosed with schizophrenia. As the disease progressed, Katharine gained control of their vast estate and devoted her energies and

resources to finding a cure for the illness. At the same time, she remained active in the movement for women’s rights, a cause that attracted many educated young women of her generation. She became vice president and treasurer of the National Amer- ican Women’s Suffrage Association and worked toward gaining women the right to vote. She also became involved in the birth control movement. In the 1920s, she smuggled diaphragms into the United States from Europe to supply Sanger’s clinics. Mc- Cormick’s willingness to defy both custom and law served her well when she teamed up with Sanger to promote the develop- ment of the oral contraceptive pill.

In 1950, three years after her husband’s death, McCormick contacted Sanger to ask how she could provide financial support for research on contraception. At the time, contraceptive re- search was considered a disreputable business. Pharmaceutical companies as well as the federal government refused to invest in it. In fact, throughout the 1950s, neither the National Science Foundation nor the National Institutes of Health provided any funds for contraceptive research.
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In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed, “I cannot imagine anything more em- phatically a subject that is not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility. . . . The government will not, so long as I am here, have a positive political doctrine in its program that has to do with the problem of birth control. That’s not our business.”
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Such resistance did nothing to deter Mc- Cormick and Sanger. Although the Planned Parenthood Feder- ation under Sanger’s leadership contributed small amounts of funding to early research, it was ultimately Katharine Mc- Cormick who bankrolled the development of the pill.
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Sanger and McCormick teamed up and began looking for someone who would carry their idea into a laboratory. They continued to insist on the need for a contraceptive that would be entirely managed by the women who used it. As strong pro- ponents of women’s right to control their own fertility, they believed it was essential that women have access to contracep- tives that did not depend on men’s cooperation.

The first task facing the two women was to
find someone to conduct the research. They set their sights on Gregory Pincus, a scientist with a somewhat tarnished reputa- tion. In the 1930s, while he was an assistant professor at Har- vard, Pincus engineered the first rabbit embryo in his lab. His research provided the foundation for in vitro fertilization, which decades later would become a standard treatment for in- fertility. Although his achievement was scientifically impor- tant, the media unleashed a storm of moral condemnation. Pincus was accused of sinister designs. He was even compared to the villain in Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
who bred babies in test tubes. A 1937 article in
Collier’s
magazine claimed that Pincus was creating a world of “Amazons” where “woman would be self-sufficient; man’s value zero.” At Har- vard, the bad publicity apparently weighed more heavily than Pincus’s significant research. In 1936, Harvard cited his work as one of the greatest scientific achievements in its history— nevertheless, it denied him tenure.
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Relieved to be free from the constraints of academia, Pincus teamed up with Hudson Hoagland, a Clarkson University biolo- gist, and together they founded the Worcester Foundation for

Experimental Biology. Although he had to scramble for funding, Pincus continued his research. Meanwhile, other scientists pur- sued investigations that would contribute to the development of the pill. Chemists Carl Djerassi and Russell Marker synthesized progesterone from a plant source, the Mexican yam. Although its contraceptive potential was not immediately evident, Pincus and his colleague Min-Chueh Chang tested the synthetic hormone, called progestin, for its ability to inhibit ovulation.
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At the Worcester Foundation, Pincus was experimenting with hormonal compounds with the hope of finding a treatment for infertility. Sanger first met Pincus through Dr. Abraham Stone, the director of her Research Bureau in New York. In 1951, Sanger granted Pincus $5,100 from PPFA to begin working on a hormonal contraceptive. Sanger then approached McCormick with a more ambitious plan to finance Pincus’s research specifi- cally to develop an oral contraceptive. McCormick liked what she saw at the Worcester facility and pledged to provide Pincus

$10,000 per year. She herself had a scientific background, having studied biology at MIT, and personally oversaw the research as well as providing financial support. McCormick ended up con- tributing more than $2 million to the pill project over the years— the equivalent of about $12 million in year 2000 dollars.
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The collaborators brought to the project a tremendous faith in the possibility of science to solve the world’s problems and bring about a better future. One of the first women trained as a biologist, McCormick was both enthusiastic and impatient as she monitored every stage of research. As a nurse, Sanger had long believed that science held the key to contraception and to women’s emancipation. As early as the 1920s she had

proclaimed, “Science must make woman the owner, the mis- tress of herself. Science, the only possible savior of mankind, must put it in the power of woman to decide for herself whether she will or will not become a mother.” Pincus, brash and confident, was full of optimism about the possibility of an oral contraceptive. As he set to work on the task, he announced to his wife, “Everything is possible in science.”
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The flamboy- ant Djerassi claimed the pill’s invention for himself, as the title of his book,
This Man’s Pill,
makes clear.
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