The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (5 page)

Pincus and Hoagland were fortunate to launch the Worcester Foundation at a time of enormous growth in the pharmaceutical industry. The catalyst was the discovery in the 1930s of the first commercially available antibacterial drugs, known as sulfas, followed by the introduction of penicillin as a drug in the early 1940s. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, drug makers like G. D. Searle & Co. were no longer content to manufacture familiar products; they were competing fiercely to discover and market new ones. In the late 1940s, Searle, a small pharmaceutical company based in Skokie, Illinois, and other drug companies were looking for a way to synthesize cortisone, which had recently been demonstrated to relieve arthritis pain. Pincus persuaded the drug company that he could synthesize cortisone by pumping serum through the adrenal gland of sows—a method referred to as perfusion—and spent half a million dollars of Searle’s money trying to prove it. But before Searle could make use of Pincus’s new technology, which was effective up to a point, researchers at the Upjohn Company in Kalamazoo, Michigan, found a simpler and cheaper way to do the job.

In the fall of 1951, hoping to repair the relationship with Searle and secure their help on Margaret Sanger’s progesterone project, Pincus went to Skokie to meet with Albert L. Raymond, the drug company’s director of research. Raymond, a small, studious man with a thin, red mustache, told Pincus that his most important benefactor was losing faith. Though Sanger and Planned Parenthood had invited Pincus to work on a new contraceptive, the money for that project was paltry and might dry up at any moment. He needed Searle. Yet his meeting with Raymond did not go well. When it ended, he was so rattled that he grabbed several sheets of hotel stationery and wrote Raymond a frantic letter.

“
Since sleep escapes me
,” he began, “I will try to set down what I think is a fair summary of what you said to-night as we were driving around. You said: ‘You haven’t given us a thing to justify the half-million that we invested in you . . . and the responsibility for this failure is yours. . . . To date your record as a contributor to the commerce of the Searle Company is a lamentable failure, replete with false leads, poor judgments, and assurances from you that were false. Yet you have the nerve to ask for more.’” After summarizing Raymond’s comments, Pincus framed his response, one that was both professionally and personally close to groveling, revealing a kind of doubt and desperation he almost never permitted anyone to see. “I feel that the moral is plain,” he wrote. “There should be, from a business point of view, no need for further support of a person with such a record.”

Pincus had not merely tried and failed, he had tried hard and failed badly. The loss of Searle’s support would be a huge blow to the Worcester Foundation. Already he was having a difficult time paying workers what they were worth. Only loyalty and love of the work kept his top scientists from taking better jobs. Now it was possible that he would have to dismiss workers or encourage them to take jobs elsewhere. For Pincus personally, the failure was profound, leaving him to wonder if he would ever achieve the greatness of which he believed he was capable and if the Worcester Foundation’s days were numbered.

“
I want you to know
,” he wrote to Raymond, “that I have indeed been embarrassed at the failure to see a paying result. I have done what I could, but it is obviously in your view no good. My attempts have led me into a situation which is rather difficult. . . . [N]ow at a time when I am just about at the peak of productive activity I see my wife buying $6.95 dresses the way she did when we were first married . . . and if I were to die I would leave my family not too well provided for.”

The letter is neither an apology nor a plea for forgiveness. It reads, instead, like the work of a passionate scientist, one who has analyzed the data carefully in an attempt to explain his own failure and its consequences. Given his uncertain status with Searle, it was no wonder Pincus would be reluctant to turn down Margaret Sanger’s “ludicrous” offer of $2,000 to fund birth-control research. He was in no position to turn down anything.

FOUR

A Go-to-Hell Look

M
ARGARET SANGER HAD
always been good at bending men to her will, exciting them with her energy and ideas, and then leading them into battle—or into bed.

With nothing more than a few words of encouragement and a vague offer of money presented at their first meeting, she had sent Gregory Pincus speeding back to his lab in Worcester, Massachusetts, ready to go to work. Yet despite her seemingly infinite powers of persuasion, there was no telling if she’d be able to get Pincus or anyone else to produce the birth-control pill that had so long been her wish.

“I’ve got herbs from Fiji which are said to be used to prevent Conception,”
she wrote to a friend and supporter in 1939
. “I’m hoping this may prove to be the ‘magic pill’ I’ve been hoping for since 1912 when women used to say ‘Do tell me the secret.’ ” And the wish was not only Sanger’s; she was merely the torch carrier for millions of women around the world. She received letters such as this one:

Englishtown, N.J.

January 5, 1925

Dear Mrs. Sanger

I received your pamplet [
sic
] on family limitation. . . . I am 30 years old have been married 14 years and have 11 children the oldest 13 and the youngest one year. I have kidney and heart disease, and every one of my children is defictived [
sic
] and we are very poor. Now Mrs. Sanger can you please help me. I have miss [
sic
] a few weeks and don’t know how to bring myself around. I am so worred [
sic
] and I have cryed my self [
sic
] sick and I don’t come around I know I will go like my poor sister she went insane and died. My Doctor said I will surely go insane if I keep this up but I can’t help it and the doctor won’t do anything for me. Oh Mrs. Sanger if I could tell you all the terrible things that I have been through with my babys [
sic
] and children you would know why I would rather die than have another one. Please no one will ever know and I will be so happy and I will do anything in this world for you and your good work. Please please just this time. Doctors are men and have not had a baby so they have no pitty [
sic
] for a poor sick Mother. You are a Mother and you know so please pitty me and help me. Please Please.

Sincerely your

[J. M.]

After three decades of searching for something better to offer the desperate women who wrote to her, Sanger had nothing. In 1950 her magic pill remained a dream, blurry and out of reach. All her life Sanger had led a fight few others would dare. But now she was old and in poor health. She’d survived a heart attack in 1949, and now she looked better suited for the deck of a Caribbean cruise ship than a picket line. At times, even some of her supporters questioned whether she was losing her edge.

She would go on, but the question was for how long.

Sanger herself had come from a family of eleven children. She was born Margaret Higgins in 1879 in the factory town of Corning, New York. Friends and family called her Maggie. Her mother, a frail and submissive woman, died of tuberculosis at age fifty. Her father, Michael Higgins, was a Civil War veteran and a stonecutter who chiseled the angels for the tombs in the town’s cemetery. He worked in a big barn of a studio where men would gather at the end of the day to talk. Michael Higgins was such a good talker that his daughter—his sixth child—liked to imagine that he could chisel away people’s outer edges and open them up,
revealing the true angels within
.
His friends loved him and trusted him
, but Maggie’s own feelings were complicated, for she always believed that her mother had fallen victim to her father’s sexual appetite. Eleven children had been too many to bear.

Maggie, too, feared her father’s passion. In an account of her life published in 1931, she described lying in her mother’s bed as a little girl, boiling with a case of typhoid fever, and feeling a man lay down beside her:

It was Father
. I was terrified. I wanted to scream out to Mother to beg her to come and take him away. I could not move, I dared not move, fearing he might move toward me. I lived through agonies of fear in a few minutes.

Sanger wrestled with feelings about her father that she couldn’t articulate. She adored him for his warmth, bravery, and independence. She thanked him for teaching her to be bold and brave and to challenge orthodoxy and narrow-mindedness wherever she found it. Michael Higgins was a Catholic apostate. Once, Higgins invited Robert Ingersoll—a freethinking secularist known to his admirers as the “Great Agnostic” and to his critics as “Robert Injuresoul”—to speak in the heavily Catholic town of Corning. Ingersoll dined with the Higgins family. After eating, Ingersoll and the Higginses walked under gray skies to Town Hall, where Michael had made arrangements for the speech to be held, only to find an angry swarm of people and
a constable barring the door
. Twelve-year-old Margaret watched her father turn and speak to the crowd, saying those who wished to hear Ingersoll speak should walk with him to the edge of town. Higgins and Ingersoll then led a three-mile procession, with Margaret and a few neighbors trailing behind. It was late in the afternoon when they climbed a hill and stood beneath a lone oak,
where Ingersoll finally spoke
.

After that, Sanger recalled, the Higgins children “were known as children of the Devil . . .
the juvenile stamp of disapproval
had been set upon us.” Her father would no longer be hired to carve angels for the Catholic cemetery, and Maggie would never forget that the Catholic Church had unfairly branded her a sinner.

But she would take away another lesson, as well: “I have always known that when they said they could stop us from speaking,
they were wrong
.” Maggie broke free.
With financial support from her older sisters
, Mary and Nan, who worked as a maid and a governess, respectively, at wealthy homes in Corning, Maggie left home and enrolled at Claverack College, a boarding school in New York’s Hudson Valley. At Claverack, she worked in the school kitchen to earn her room and board but also began speaking out on suffrage and women’s emancipation, which were radical issues at the time. When her mother died in 1899, worn out by consumption at the age of fifty, Maggie might have been expected to return home and inherit a slew of household chores. She might have spent the rest of her life in a role of forced domesticity, shuffling along from subservient daughter to subservient wife to subservient mother until her fighting spirit was gone. But again she escaped, thanks in part to financial support from her sisters. Maggie Higgins enrolled in nursing school at the White Plains Hospital in Westchester County, New York. “I wanted a world of action,” she wrote. “
I longed for romance
, dancing, wooing, experience.” Marriage was not on that list, but sex certainly was. She began to think of sex as something more than recreational—a path to self-improvement, a source of health and happiness, and perhaps even liberation.

Hers was a philosophy born of a strong libido and a strong mind. Maggie Higgins read
Love’s Coming of Age
, by Edward Carpenter, who equated the power of sex with religious consecration. She discussed with friends the radical new ideas of Sigmund Freud, who believed that sex was the most important determinant of self. The removal of sexual restraints, said the great Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, would liberate the soul and allow women to more fully experience life and all its joys. Maggie agreed. There was only one hitch, as far as she was concerned: Freud never addressed the fact that sex could result in pregnancy as well as liberation, and that the two were not entirely compatible.

Though she considered
marriage “akin to suicide,”
at the age of twenty-two Maggie met a man at a hospital dance, a handsome young painter and architect named William Sanger, the son of German Jewish immigrants. She described their early romance in a manner that may have suggested her ambivalence toward courtship and marriage: “On one of our rambles he idly pulled at some vines on a stone wall, and then, with his hands, tilted my face for a kiss. The next morning, to my mortification, four telltale finger marks were outlined on my cheek by poison ivy blisters. . . .
I was sick for two months
.” She recovered; they fell in love, married, and built a home in Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester County, New York. Soon came three children, two boys and a girl. Sanger, unsurprisingly, found no bliss in suburbia or in marriage. In 1912, the family moved to New York City, and Margaret began spending time in a place better suited to her rebel soul: Greenwich Village.

The Village was packed with radicals and rogues. Longshoremen occupied barstools next to poets. The patron of the arts and activist Mabel Dodge held salons with guests she described as “
Socialists, Trade Unionists, Anarchists
, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers . . . Newspapermen, Artists, Modern Artists.” It was in the Village that Sanger met the celebrated Socialist leader Eugene Debs and the feminist agitator Emma Goldman, who became a mentor to her. It was there that she heard Big Bill Haywood discussing the Industrial Workers of the World and Walter Lippmann sharing his thoughts on Freud. Some radicals, influenced in large part by Freud, urged women to fight for more than the vote. They wanted a complete change in values and attitudes toward the role of women in society. They wanted to make sexual freedom a part of broader social reform. They wanted motherhood to be voluntary. Sanger went further: she thought sex should be at the
center
of any reform.