Interestingly and unusually, one factor almost wholly absent is that of avarice: though money was required and wealthy interests pursued to fund the research, none of the intriguing individuals who occupy the centre of Eig's story was motivated by personal financial gain. Making the project happen required the union of diverse interests ranging from the mildly subversive to the sinister – scientists after an intellectual breakthrough sex-positive radical feminists out to change society for good activists concerned with making life better for the poor eugenicists who conversely wanted to curtail breeding by groups they deemed socially undesirable.

Side-effects, still an issue for many users of the Pill, caused problems from the start testing was arduous, somewhat haphazard, and had to be organised without any governmental support opposition from religious interests was staunch and political backing limited. None of this is to say that this book is either politically dogmatic, or blind to the complications inherent in what was a medically and socially complicated innovation. Eig's book returns repeatedly to the plight of such married women, reminding the reader that swinging single girls in pursuit of strings-free sex were not the only beneficiaries of the Pill's invention: mothers who wanted to maintain their own health and feed all their children were in dire need of intervention also, not because they disdained the family, but because they wanted to keep theirs safe and functional.

Easy enough as a priest or a male lawmaker to lean on religious or sentimental arguments about the primacy of the family not so easy to be a woman living in poverty with ten-plus children. However one might respond to some of the complexities of current feminist debates, it's sobering and significant to be reminded how very recently the life of any sexually active and fertile woman – married or otherwise – was dominated by the prospect of pregnancy.

The Birth of the Pill by Jonathan Eig