A History of the World (79 page)

The United States had come comparatively late to voting equality. Before the First World War, only a few nations had experimented with such a radical step, notably the Finns, the Norwegians and the Australians. Individual US states, such as Oregon, Washington and California, had given women the vote too. But it took the war and its immediate aftermath to produce a landslide of change, in places such as Britain, Germany, Austria, most of Eastern Europe and Russia, New Zealand and Holland. The battle in the US had been long and tough but, just as in Britain, it threw up a new generation of women campaigners who learned to speak in public, to organize successfully and
to disrupt their opponents’ meetings. Earlier in this book we saw how war can drive change, from political systems to new technologies; a transformation in the public rights of women can be added to the list.

The need for women to do war work had certainly transformed their situation in America, where Katharine became chair of the women’s committee of the National Council of Defense, which was in charge of Red Cross supplies, child welfare, looking after the rights of women in factories and much else. By 1920, when the US Congress finally passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the constitution, imposing women’s suffrage throughout the country, Katharine was looking for new challenges. The following year, when she received a flyer from Sanger announcing the first American Birth Control Conference at New York’s Plaza Hotel, she wrote back and suggested a meeting. Two tough women; and they clicked.
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Katharine McCormick had money, connections and influence. Margaret Sanger needed all of these, but she also needed contraceptive devices for her ‘Clinical Research Bureau’. In her admittedly unreliable autobiography she describes the day her clinic opened and was mobbed by women: ‘Halfway to the corner they stood in line, shawled, hatless, their red hands clasping the chapped smaller ones of their children. All day long, in ever increasing numbers they came . . . Jews and Christians, Protestants and Roman Catholics alike made their confessions to us.’ One told her that she had had fifteen children of whom only six were living: she was thirty-seven but looked fifty. Another told Sanger: ‘If you don’t help me, I’m going to chop up a glass and swallow it tonight!’

By help, these women meant contraceptives, not more advice, but at this stage this was still difficult. Comstock himself was long gone, but the American political mood remained puritanical: the sale of alcohol was banned from 1920 to 1933 – the first and greatest failure in the war on drugs. The ‘prohibition era’, though, actually helped the birth-control campaigners because bootleggers were willing to smuggle diaphragms with the booze, if only in small quantities. Where were the diaphrams? In Europe.

So, one day in 1922, Mrs McCormick went shopping. She headed off on a liner for a four-month trip with three large trunks and five suitcases, apparently intent on snapping up rather large amounts of the latest European fashions. Her family owned a château in
Switzerland, overlooking Lake Geneva. It had been a famous gathering-point for Enlightenment intellectuals. Posing as a doctor, Katharine now ordered large quantities of diaphragms from French and Italian manufacturers to be sent to the château, while she bought a lot of dresses and coats. Next, she hired local Swiss women to sew more than a thousand diaphragms into the clothes, which were then tightly packed into her luggage, now comprising eight trunks. She then imperiously marched her contraband past French and US customs officials, delivering them by truck to the Sanger clinic.

Were that all, it would have been a significant contribution to the birth-control movement, which McCormick continued to quietly fund, though soon Sanger also married a rich man, an oil baron, and would have no further money troubles. But it was far from all.

In 1947, Stanley McCormick died. Nobody could have asked for a better wife: Katharine had looked after him devotedly, lavishing his family money on gardeners, servants, doctors and musicians to make his self-torturing life a little easier. Given the belief that insanity was hereditary, his illness may well have contributed to Katharine’s decision to have no children of her own; and that in turn would have sharpened her interest in contraception. Now he was gone, his family wanted some control over the huge fortune, but Katharine was still rich almost beyond imagining. What could she do with the money? She wrote to Sanger. Both women were now in their seventies; but their reconnection would be even more significant than their original meeting.

On 27 October 1950, Sanger replied to the letter from McCormick in which she had offered Margaret financial help: ‘I consider that the world, and almost our civilization for the next twenty-five years is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles and amongst the most ignorant people.’ The eugenic note was not a slip of the pen. She went on to add that ‘now, immediately, there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them’.
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McCormick and others would get her off that hobby-horse, but for both of them the key thing was to find that ‘simple, cheap, safe’ answer.

A few months after receiving Margaret’s letter, Katharine McCormick arranged a dinner in New York with a research scientist from
Massachusetts who looked strikingly like Einstein, but who was actually a world expert in mammalian eggs. If anyone could find that answer quickly, Gregory Pincus was the man. How much would it cost? $25,000, he thought. In fact McCormick would spend nearly $2 million. Soon both Sanger and McCormick, those formidable elderly ladies, were hovering over Pincus in his Massachusetts lab.

Pincus was not working alone. A gynaecologist called John Rock had been studying progesterone, a key hormone in fertilization which helps ensure the body does not produce multiple pregnancies. So had two other scientists, a young Jewish refugee from Vienna called Carl Djerassi, and Frank Colton. None of these had it in mind to produce a contraceptive pill; synthetic hormones were the big new thing at the time, in great demand by the drug companies. But Djerassi, while working in Mexico, synthesized a drug that was much stronger than natural progesterone and could be taken orally. It was initially intended to combat severe menstrual bleeding, but it would be key to the success of what would soon be called simply ‘the Pill’.

Pincus was already famous, or notorious, as the man who had fertilized rabbit eggs in a test-tube, earning himself the ‘Dr Frankenstein’ label in newspapers and causing waves in the scientific world. Before the war, Harvard had denied him tenure – Pincus thought, because he was ‘a self-advertising Jew who published too soon and talked too much’.
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He set to work on his new task, then in 1952 bumped into one of the men who had been studying progesterone, again not in order to prevent pregnancy, but this time in order to help infertile women. Though he was a devout Catholic this man agreed to work with Pincus, helping him towards the breakthroughs that would lead to an oral drug which Colton and Djerassi would refine. Plenty of hurdles had to be cleared en route, but after a successful clinical trial, at a conference in Tokyo in 1953 Pincus announced what they had achieved. And . . . nobody took any notice.

The commercial struggle to test and produce a saleable product took years, but the Pill was finally unveiled on 11 May 1960 as a contraceptive. Few innovations have made as big an impact on as many people. How much more effective was it than other methods of contraception? A detailed study in 1961 found the failure rate from condoms was high, 28 per cent; from diaphragms even higher, nearly 34 per cent, and from vaginal suppositories, 42 per cent. With the Pill,
it was less than 2 per cent.
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Women voted yes: in its first year, four hundred thousand Americans took it. By 1965, it was estimated that a quarter of all married women under the age of forty-five in the US were taking it; by 1984 the worldwide estimate was up to eighty million.
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It is important to remember that modern science is all about collaboration, shared achievement and serendipity, rather than about a single genius leaping naked from his bath, yelling ‘I’ve got it!’

This is also a story about capitalism. Had poor Stanley McCormick’s father not made a fortune from harvesting-machines, Katharine would not have had the money to go over to Europe and smuggle diaphragms home, or to bankroll Pincus in his search for the Pill. Had the US drug companies not been so keen on the profits to be made, they would have struggled less hard to develop synthetic hormones. Had America not become a rich consumer economy whose women expected greater freedom and were already experiencing the liberating effect of new machines in the home, the take-up of the new Pill would have been slower. Given the rapid advance of biochemistry at the time, it would certainly have happened eventually; though at another time, when Christian moralism was less influential in American life. In the 1930s, say, or indeed today, the Pill might not have been licensed so easily.

Certainly, without those two determined septuagenarians, it would not have happened when it did. One had started out as an anarchist and political radical, hoping for the downfall of American capitalism; the other was married to American capitalism. The Pill needed them both, the political agitator who challenged conventional thinking, and the quietly resolute financial backer. This unlikely partnership goes some way to explaining the underlying strength of American culture, its radicalism and its energy.

The Pill was morally controversial. It probably always will be. Many religious people, notably Roman Catholics, oppose contraception in any event, while others blame it for a radical loosening of traditional sexual morality in the 1960s and afterwards. It can have serious side-effects; add to that the fact that many women feel angered that less effort has been made to find an oral contraceptive focusing on the other sex, one that would stop men being able to fertilize eggs. All the same, this was a democratic technology, which people voted for by
buying it. Because of it, women were for the first time easily and reliably able to distance sexual pleasure from the likelihood of pregnancy. A different relationship, between the body as a zone of pleasure and delight, and reproduction, became possible – something the young Sanger and her anarchist friends had talked about nearly sixty years before. The argument that the market can be as destabilizing for some as it is liberating for others, and as revolutionary as any state action, is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in the Pill.

A War of the Empires

The First World War had been a European tribal war, which drew in other continents and peoples mainly on account of Europe’s empires. Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians and South Africans rallied to the British Empire’s summons. Germany’s attempt to conjure up jihad against the British in the Middle East helped bring the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and the Arabs, into the conflict. America joined in, as we have seen, because her own security seemed threatened by both German submarines and Mexican intrigues. The countries of Europe were still so world-dominant that when they collided, the alarm was sounded almost everywhere around the planet.

The Second World War followed the same pattern – some historians have depicted it as the second half of a single conflict. It too began in Europe and sucked in much of the globe. But there was a key difference. Early German victory on the European continent humiliated the other European powers, weakened their empires and spread the war to Asia. It made it easier for a new empire, the Japanese, to rip through old colonies around the Pacific; it also meant the Japanese, already at war in China, were bound to come into conflict with America. Early German victories had another effect: they convinced Hitler that he was indeed a military genius and encouraged him to carry through his original dream and invade the USSR. This had the perverse effect of ranging the United States and the old European imperial powers, above all Britain, alongside their bitterest political enemy.

So though the Second World War is sometimes seen as the last great ideological war, a battle to ‘save democracy’, the inconvenient
fact is that it was won partly by Stalin’s totalitarian regime, and could not have been won without it.

It would be more accurate to see this as the last great imperial war. Japan was trying to build an empire in China and Manchuria and on the relics of the British and Dutch Far Eastern empires (and hoped to include British India). The German plan was for the creation of a German empire in what had been central Europe and western Russia. Even Stalin, constantly attacking ‘imperialism’, had been in on the act. After abandoning world revolution for ‘socialism in one country’, he had updated Russia’s traditional imperial attitude. We have seen how in Ivan the Terrible’s time Russia engulfed Kazan and began to devour Siberia. This was followed by the invasion and seizure of the Caucasus and by the establishment of Russian hegemony over the Ukraine, Georgia, Chechnya and Mongolia. The Russians regarded Finland, the Baltic states and much of Poland as naturally ‘theirs’ too; the Second World War began when the Russians were already fighting the Finns. Stalin’s vision of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics really signified Russian control over as much of this vast area as was militarily possible. He was even prepared to order the mass migration of entire peoples in order to subdue dissent. The national minorities had lower status, barely disguised by a folkloric veil of harmony; it was later said that in the USSR ‘the minorities dance’.

Finally, the forced engagement of the US after Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 led to America dominating half the world through a virtual empire, not of guardhouses and governors, but of nuclear firepower, proxy wars, commodities and finance. They ended up with a permanent military presence stretching from Japan to Western Europe; deeply involved in the politics of South America; and with large fleets that swiftly replaced Britain’s Royal Navy as guardians of Western influence. Still strongly hostile to the ‘old empires’ of Europe, American success in the war would be followed by a dramatic spread of American business, and by the emergence of the dollar as the world’s most important currency. All this was good news for those who breathed freely under the US shield, saved from the Communist-imperial vision. But others saw it as the moment of lost innocence when an American republic became the American empire.