Leoqueen.555’s Reviews > The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution > Status Update

“U.S. APPROVES PILL FOR BIRTH CONTROL,” read the headline in the New York Times. The article, only 136 words long, appeared on page seventy-five of the Tuesday, May 10, edition. “Approval was based on the question of safety,” associate FDA commissioner John L. Harvey said in his official announcement. “We had no choice as to the morality that might be involved.

Even so, there was no young version of Margaret Sanger on the American scene to lead the revolution. No one yet dared declare that motherhood ought to be voluntary, that women had as much right to sexual pleasure as men, that marriage was not necessarily meant to be dominated by the husband, or that women were as entitled to a college education and good jobs as men were.