Reviews tagging 'Mental illness'

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig

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nerdy_reader_9571's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative medium-paced

3.25

 
I keep going back and forth about whether I would ever actually recommend this book to anyone because the author, Jonathan Eig, does include some of the more jarring pieces of the pill’s history like the fact that the pill was tested on a disturbingly low amount of women because many test subjects dropped out of the study due to the pill’s side effects or the fact that the study’s lead scientists forced the pill both on patients in hospitals who didn’t have the right to refuse the treatment or be fully informed of the new medication that they were taking and on prison inmates in Puerto Rican jails. However, despite including these darker details the author makes a point to state that these methods were standard for the time period in which the study took place and uses terms like “recruited” and “enrolled” to describe individuals who were forced to take the experimental pill. While this book provides a large amount of information about the formation of the first birth control pill and doesn’t hide many of the darker details of the pill’s history, Eig has framed this book around four people—two scientists and two of their financial backers—who are cast as heroes who liberated women by providing them with an easy-to-take method of contraception that doesn’t require their partner’s participation or knowledge, despite those heroes’ close associations with the eugenics movement (recast in this book as a “social movement” that is often mentioned but not explored or defined), their motivations for pursuing this method of birth control, and their level of comfort with forced experimentation. What this book which is marketed and set up as a story of women’s liberation is lacking is the perspective of women. I noticed throughout the book that there are almost no perspectives provided from any of the women who were part of the experimentation process or from women whose lives had been impacted by the formation of the birth control pill. Instead, throughout the book the author shoehorns the perspective of Hugh Hefner of all people into this story to gain Hefner’s valuable perspective on the impact that the pill had on his business. While I learned a lot about the history of the pill from this book, there has to be a better story out there about the pill’s formation that actually considers the women who were involved in the formation of the pill as test subjects and considers the women who were impacted by the release of the pill. 
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