The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (10 page)

As a teenager, Pincus often used his diary to explore his thoughts and feelings on happiness (“I have been so happy all my life that I can but wish
for the same joy in the future
”), on religion (“I believe that God, or what I choose to call God, is but
the embodiment of all our ideals
”), on his flaws (“I really should cultivate a thriftiness and neatness and general economy which
I have not heretofore strictly practiced
”), on friendship (“
the holiest passion on this earth
”), and on sex (“My affection easily leads me to express it in a kiss,” he wrote in his diary. “My relations I kiss quite without restraint. My friends I cannot kiss at all. How can I express my love for them? It is bursting for expression. . . . I am such an
affectionate being
. I can’t help it”).

He had grown into a tall, strong, handsome man like his father, but he cultivated the look of an intellectual, wearing round, wire-rimmed glasses and growing his brown hair long. He complained that his passions were often too intense for others to handle. As an undergraduate at Cornell University, he wrote to his mother to say that while he loved her, he did not share her old-fashioned opinions about sex:

Values and standards which have been
presented to you as scarcely challengeable I’ve been foolish (or brave) enough to question. And some of them have not stood up very well. My own conclusions may be very wrong indeed, but they are true for me, and if I were to abandon them, I’d be left floundering, uncertain. Furthermore, I do not think that we differ very strongly in idea. Perhaps as far as sex is concerned there is some slight difference. The sexual impulse is to me neither a low, degrading thing nor something extremely sacrosanct and holy. I regard [it] rather as a fundamentally normal, clean, lifeful instinct. The pleasure derived from its satisfaction, the release of tense emotions isn’t sinful of course. But I could never gain any real pleasure from promiscuous satisfaction. I feel that I must love the girl with whom I share this impulse. I do not think that it is necessary for me to wait till marriage for its satisfaction. And I would not feel obliged to wait until I am married because I don’t see why a legal ceremony makes it any more beautiful. I think you can understand this. For why should such a natural, fine ardor be repressed and held degraded because a justice of peace has not mumbled a few words!

Pincus went on in the letter to say he had fallen in love with a young woman named Denah who dropped him because of his “polygamous nature.” But he was untroubled. “I am not in love with her anymore, nor she with me. We are both glad of it.”

Pincus considered sex beautiful, an expression of love, but he was not as obsessed as Sanger. He did not place sex at the center of his universe and had no intent of making it the subject of his career; he was far too ambitious to consider such a thing. At Cornell, he initially majored in agriculture with a specialty in pomology, the cultivation of fruit. He worked his way through school
washing dishes and waiting tables
. With his father unemployed, Goody scraped by, often hitchhiking instead of taking the train to go home to
his family during vacations
. His grades were not exceptional—more B’s than A’s—and he once was accused of cheating on an exam, a charge that was dismissed after a hearing. But grades weren’t everything to him. Pincus sat on rocks and wrote love poems and plays and cofounded a literary journal. He fancied himself a great romantic, yet he also remained every bit the mama’s boy, desperate to please.

Goody’s mother had six children, five boys and a girl, each one of them smart and ambitious. Lizzie was a confident and intelligent woman who expected greatness from her children—and let them know it repeatedly. “My every thought, feeling, and emotion was given unconditionally to my dear ones, and their happiness was the only reward I asked for,”
she wrote in a memoir
. “And so I go on to the end—hoping, praying, serving, loving—realizing that only the strong are free.”

One summer, when his father was yet again unemployed, Goody wrote to his mother to say he was thinking about postponing his studies so he could find a job and earn money. In the undated letter, he carefully laid out all the pros and cons, clearly seeking his mother’s approval for whatever he decided. “Mama,” he wrote, “we have dreams that we long to see fulfilled. If these are too long deferred they lose their vital meaning, as an underground spring vainly seeking an outlet and finally drying up at the source because it cannot gush forth its sweetness.” He went on, quoting Longfellow’s poem,
The Village Blacksmith
: “My idea of a successful man is not one who makes a lot of money, or even one who makes a name for himself in the world. Fame is not success. A successful man or woman is one who ‘toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing, onward through life . . . goes’ with a
clear conscience and a big heart
.”

One day during his senior year, Pincus returned home—his family having moved again, this time to Vineland, New Jersey—to find a new occupant, a ravishing older woman, petite, dark-haired, and hazel-eyed, with a prominent bump on the bridge of her prominent nose. Her name was Elizabeth Notkin. After breaking off an engagement to a medical student in Montreal, Lizzie (as everyone called her) had moved to the United States to work as a field social worker with the National Council of Jewish Women. During her training, she boarded at the Pincus home.

The Pincus boys had never seen anyone like Lizzie, who cursed, drank, and chain-smoked
Philip Morris cigarettes
. She carried herself with the snooty confidence of a New York City intellectual, not the daughter of a mattress factory owner from Montreal.

A cousin recalled meeting Lizzie once and greeting her casually with, “So, what have you been up to, Lizzie?”

“
Growing a penis
,” she deadpanned in her low, gravelly voice, and took a drag of a cigarette.

All the Pincus boys fell in love with her.

Goody was only twenty—about to enter Harvard to pursue a graduate degree in biology—when he encountered this bold and beautiful woman. Lizzie, who was about four years older, treated him at first as if he were a child, asking the young man what he intended to do with his life when he finished school.

Goody, who always loved a challenge, was not to be intimidated.

“
I’m a sexologist
,” he said. Present tense, not future.

This was 1923. No one had ever heard of such a thing. It didn’t matter. He had gotten her attention. The next year, when Lizzie was visiting Goody at Harvard, they went before a judge and married without telling their families.

Gregory Pincus was not a sexologist, of course, although he was beginning to read and explore the works of Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the German neuropsychiatrist who published a groundbreaking examination of sexual aberrations in 1886. Harvard, as historian Richard Norton Smith noted, considered itself the “
epicenter of American education
,” a place where a disproportionate number of the world’s most intelligent people gathered not only to advance their own intelligence but to launch schemes and dreams that would change the world. Pincus did his graduate work at Harvard’s Bussey Institution of Applied Biology, which was founded in 1871 as the university’s “agricultural college” but was reformed and expanded to become the nation’s leading center of agricultural science. Though Goody Pincus hoped to be among the world changers, he did not get off to a promising start, earning nothing but B’s and C’s in his first year in Cambridge. In the lab, he came under the influence of William Castle, a leading mammalian geneticist, and wrote his dissertation on the inheritance of coat colors in rats.

After his courthouse wedding, Pincus was too busy and too poor to think about finding a home and settling down. So Lizzie moved into the crowded Cambridge apartment Goody shared with his brother Bernard, known to the family as Bun, and one of Goody’s friends from high school, Leon Lifschitz, who was enrolled in law school. Goody’s mother was horrified by the living arrangements, but, then again, she seemed horrified by almost everything connected with her new daughter-in-law. Goody, Bun, and Lifschitz went in together as partners in a Harvard Square bookshop called The Alcove. Lizzie worked there, too, part-time, although not for long. Soon, like so many newlyweds of her generation, she was pregnant with her first child.

They named the boy Alex John, and they would call him John. Lizzie suffered through a long and terrible labor giving birth. As a result, she was disinclined to have another child in the years immediately after.
What form of birth control she used after the arrival of her son no one knows
.

When he was twenty-seven and still idealistic enough to believe he could change the world, Goody Pincus was appointed an instructor in the department of general physiology at Harvard. A year later he was promoted to assistant professor of biology, where he worked under a brilliant young physiologist named William J. Crozier, who would both inspire and jeopardize Pincus’s career.

Crozier was a hard-driving, ambitious scholar. At thirty-two, he was the youngest associate professor at Harvard. Eager students flocked to him, and he encouraged his protégés to challenge the status quo, to be aggressive, and to use scientific theory to solve practical problems. Crozier was a former student of Jacques Loeb, the German-born American biologist who conducted research in tropisms—or reflexes in which a stimulus causes an organism to orient in a certain way (a plant moving toward light, for example, or roots growing in the direction of gravity). Loeb believed that living things were much like machines, and machines could be made to work the way humans wanted. Taking this theory a step further, he concluded that eggs were the factories that produced these living machines, and if the eggs could be manipulated, life might be artificially produced. Loeb worked with sea urchin eggs surrounded by seawater. When he altered the salt content in the water, the eggs divided and reproduced automatically. Loeb called it
parthenogenesis
—others called it virgin birth—and he promised that it might soon work for mammals. There was no great mystery to life, Loeb suggested; it was all within the control of science.

“
I wanted to take life in my hands
and
play
with it,” Loeb declared, “to start it, stop it, vary it, study it under every condition, to direct it at my will!” The discovery made him a star. Journalists and novelists predicted his work would lead to the factory farming of animals and even children. In 1932, Aldous Huxley published
Brave New World
, a dystopian novel that imagined a future inspired in part by Loeb’s work, a future in which people chewed sex-hormone gum to regulate their libidos, women wore “Malthusian belts” to provide universal contraception, and sex was purely recreational. Reproduction by sex was a thing of the past in Huxley’s book, replaced by “Hatcheries and Conditioning Centres” that grew babies from test tubes. To some, Loeb was a visionary, a mystic; to others, he was a demon, a scientist playing God, ignoring the unpredictability and beautiful messiness of life. To Pincus, he was a genius whose work hadn’t gone far enough. Loeb had never moved on to mammals. Pincus made up his mind to try it himself.

At Harvard, he experimented mostly with rats, studying how they responded to heat and light. When he graduated, he won a fellowship to work on his postdoctorate—studying for two years at Harvard and one year in Europe, dividing time between the University of Cambridge in England and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In Europe, for the first time, Pincus began researching the eggs of mammals, the subject that would become his life’s work. In Germany, he also observed how scientists were beginning to argue for the use of genetics to create a superior race of humans. As a Jew and a scientist, he was troubled by this misuse of science and criticized it in an unpublished manuscript, arguing that “the race pretension and so called eugenic measure of the Nazi-Fascist variety and genetic nonsense . . . to create a race by breeding and selection would be a gigantic undertaking with
a very good probability of failure
.” When Pincus returned to Harvard as a professor in 1930, he was ready to make his mark and follow in the bold paths of Loeb and Crozier.