The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (46 page)

In 1970, women comprised 10 percent of first-year law students and 4 percent of business school students; ten years later, those numbers jumped to 36 percent and 28 percent, respectively. And it wasn’t just the women’s movement making it happen. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin’s research has shown that the pill had a direct effect. Women were more likely to enroll in graduate school and postpone marriage in states that lowered the age of consent for contraception from twenty-one to eighteen.
The pill, Goldin concluded, lowered the cost of pursuing careers
for women. No longer were they forced to sacrifice their social lives and prospects for marriage by choosing graduate school or ambitious career paths. In another study, economist Martha J. Bailey of the University of Michigan has shown that access to the pill boosted women’s hourly wages by 8 percent and accounted for a whopping
30 percent of the convergence
of the gender gap in earnings between 1990 and 2000.

In 1970, the median age at which college graduates married was about twenty-three. Five years later, it rose to about twenty-five and a half. When women did marry and did start families, the families were usually smaller than they had been a decade earlier. In 1963, 80 percent of non-Catholic college women wanted three or more children. A decade later that number dropped to 29 percent. In 1960, a typical American woman had 3.6 children. Two decades later, the number had dropped below two. In 1970, 80 percent of women with young children stayed home to care for the children and 20 percent worked. Today, those numbers have reversed.

The pill today remains one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. It is also one of the most widely examined. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, concerns arose about health risks associated with the pill, especially blood clots, and some leaders of the feminist movement began urging women to look for alternatives. Sales dipped briefly. Today, however, most research has concluded that the pill is not only safe but perhaps even beneficial in ways beyond contraception.

In 2010, British scientists released the results of a forty-year study, “Mortality Among Contraceptive Pill Users,” that showed that women taking the birth-control pill were less likely than other women to die of heart disease, cancer, and other ailments. The study, which tracked forty-six thousand women, helped ease concerns about elevated risk of cancer or strokes. Women who took the pill were 12 percent less likely to die from any cause during the study. “Many women, especially those who used the
first generation of oral contraceptives
, are likely to be reassured by our results,” said Philip Hannaford of the University of Aberdeen.

When he began his work testing progesterone on lab animals at the Worcester Foundation, when he was raising money by going door to door in the community where he lived, or when he was scrambling to assemble a few dozen subjects for experimentation by recruiting infertile patients of local gynecologists, Gregory Goodwin Pincus could not have dreamed that a clinical study would one day track tens of thousands of women over decades to check on the long-term effects of his pill.

Backed in part by the one million dollars bequeathed by McCormick, the Worcester Foundation operated into the 1970s, still focusing on women’s health and conducting early research that would lead to the development of the breast-cancer drug Tamoxifen.

Pincus, Sanger, McCormick, and Rock no doubt would have been pleased that their legacy continued to produce important advances in women’s health, but without their single-minded drive the Foundation fell upon hard times, and in the 1990s it merged with the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Today the Foundation’s grounds have been largely abandoned, with the exception of the Hoagland-Pincus Conference Center, which is still used by the university. A plaque there honors Hoagland and Pincus for their “advancement of knowledge . . . and betterment of mankind.”

One day in the fall of 2011, Laura Pincus Bernard, Goody’s daughter, walked through the empty halls of the ivy-covered building where her father once worked, where M. C. Chang once slept, where animals once mated or attempted to mate before giving their lives to science. The place was deserted except for a lone woman tapping a computer keyboard at a desk near the entrance.

Laura explained who she was and asked if she might look around. She climbed a narrow staircase to the attic, stepping carefully through a maze of dented file cabinets, old desks, chairs, and boxes filled with notebooks and loose sheets of paper containing the results of long-forgotten experiments. The desks were cheaply built—long plywood surfaces supported by metal drawers painted light shades of pink and avocado. Beakers and test tubes sat everywhere—in boxes, on countertops, and under venting hoods—their lids covered crudely in aluminum foil, as if having recently been sterilized and waiting for a scientist to return and use them again.

If it struck Laura as sad to see her father’s foundation in such disrepair, she did not let on as she stepped across creaking floors through the detritus of the lab. Dust motes floated in the air. Outside, a school bus stopped and started again.

In a strange way, this old house served as a more fitting memorial than the conference center at the other end of the driveway. Even in its prime, the Worcester Foundation’s headquarters had never impressed. The building, like the Foundation itself and the career of its founding scientist, had been a study in improvisation. Laura and others who had been there during the development of the pill knew what a close call the discovery had been—how success had sprung, more than anything, from the courage and conviction of the characters involved. That something so big and world changing had come from so humble a place seemed little short of a miracle.

Illustrations

Margaret Sanger, shown here in 1922, became one of the country’s first crusaders for contraception and sexual freedom. She longed for a “magic pill” that would separate sex from reproduction.
(Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.)

In this edition of Sanger’s
Birth Control Review
, from 1923, she illustrated with little subtlety her view of the impact of unplanned pregnancies.
(Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.)

A beautiful beginning: Katharine and Stanley McCormick pose at the site of their wedding in Switzerland, 1904.
(Courtesy MIT Museum)

In 1925, Sanger and Charles V. Drysdale of London led the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference, where they promoted contraception as a means for checking overpopulation, preventing war, and extending the span of life.

In 1929, Gregory Pincus appeared poised for a brilliant career at Harvard.
(Courtesy of Laura Bernard)