“In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire,” wrote the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1969, excited that the invention was already upturning “age-old beliefs, practices and institutions”. The bestower of this Promethean gift, and the hero of Jonathan Eig’s book, was an unlikely figure: Gregory Pincus, “a scientist with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation”. He was an expert in mammalian reproduction, famous for having created a test-tube rabbit, which saw him vilified in the press as a new Frankenstein. With his bristling moustache and uncombed hair, the chain-smoking biologist resembled “a cross between Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx”.
In the winter of 1950, the 47-year-old Pincus met Margaret Sanger, introduced in the first line of Eig’s book as “an old woman [she was 71] who loved sex and had spent 40 years seeking a way to make it better”; her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan described her as “a propagandist for the joys of the flesh”. She had numerous lovers – enjoying, she said, being “ravaged by romances”. In 1914, when facing charges of breaking the obscenity laws because of an article she published in her radical newspaper, the Women Rebel, she abandoned her long-suffering husband and fled to Europe. There she had an affair with the English sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis, who wrote that he “had never been so quickly or completely drawn to a woman in the whole of his life”, as well as with HG Wells and the Spanish anarchist Lorenzo Portet. She was, writes Eig, “a copper-haired, blunt-talking bundle of energy”.
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