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  • America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation
  • Elizabeth Siegel Watkins
Elaine Tyler May . America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation. New York: Basic Books, 2010. vii + 214 pp. $29.95 (978-0-465-01152-0).

In May 2010, the birth control pill reached its fiftieth birthday. The semicentennial of the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the first oral contraceptive was marked by extensive reporting in newspapers and magazines and on television, radio, and the Internet. Time magazine featured the pill on its cover, Harry Smith hosted Gloria Steinem in a panel discussion on CBS's The Early Show, and Basic Books released Elaine Tyler May's new book, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation. May is of course well known as one of the foremost research scholars in American studies and women's history, with several books to her credit on women, families, and reproduction in the twentieth century.

America and the Pill seems to be intended for a more general audience. The book relies heavily on Lara Marks's Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill, Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner's The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolution, Andrea Tone's Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, and this reviewer's On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970, among others.1 May rehearses well-known stories about the pill: the parts played by Margaret Sanger and Katherine Dexter McCormick in its genesis, the context of concerns about overpopulation in the 1950s and 60s, its ambiguous role in the sexual revolution, its more certain role in the contraceptive revolution, its rejection by the Catholic hierarchy and its acceptance by the Catholic laity, its role in galvanizing the women's health movement and the FDA mandate for the first patient package insert, and failed attempts to develop a male counterpart. The book breezes quickly through these multiple aspects of the pill's history, at times muting the nuances of the analyses developed by other authors.

One of the hallmarks of May's work is her creative use of surveys and calls for personal testimonies, incorporating the voices of individual women and men [End Page 700] into social history and thereby adding texture to her analysis of broad historical trends. In America and the Pill, May supplements her synthetic narrative with quotations from individuals who responded to an Internet request. She reports that she received emails from hundreds of people; these personal tales and musings "reflect the profound ways in which the pill has become embedded in both public and private life" (p. 166). May does not generalize from this small sampling (less than one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the twelve million American women taking the pill today) but employs it instead to illustrate how some women use and understand oral contraception today and also to demonstrate "how much has changed and how much has remained the same" in women's lives over the past fifty years (p. 145).

In the most interesting chapter of the book, May takes up the issue of the impact of the pill on men in the 1960s. She is one of the first authors to do so, as evidenced by the relative lack of secondary sources cited here, and this foray may be the most significant contribution to the abundant existing historiography on birth control. She looks at Playboy magazine for evidence of the male perspective; a broader selection of primary materials would add depth and breadth to this innovative analysis.

A number of scholars have recently turned their attention to the pill. Carrie Eisert's dissertation research on the psychological conceptions of oral contraceptive patients in the 1960s comes to mind, as does Heather Monroe Prescott's work on the campaign to switch oral contraceptives from prescription to over-the-counter sales in the 1990s. America and the Pill, while covering territory familiar to many historians of medicine, provides useful background for these forthcoming studies.

Elizabeth Siegel Watkins
University of California, San Francisco

Footnotes

1. Lara Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill...

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