The Birth of the Pill Review – One Giant Leap for Womankind
February 10, 2015
(The Guardian) – Pincus, Rock, and two remarkable women – the birth control pioneers Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick – are at the heart of this brilliant book by American journalist Jonathan Eig. It opens with a meeting in New York between Sanger and Pincus in 1950, when they discussed developing an oral contraceptive. Pincus was 47 and looked like “a cross between Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx”; Sanger was 71, worn out after spending most of her life campaigning for women’s rights, and convinced that the lack of reliable contraception was the biggest obstacle to equality.