America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation
Basic Books (April 27, 2010) | ISBN: 0465011527 | 224 pages | PDF | 1 MB
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of FDA approval of an oral contraceptive for women—the pill—historian May, whose professional focus has been on marriage, divorce, and the family in America, offers a notably uncontentious précis of the pill’s half-century in American life. She sticks to the evidence to recall the now extravagant-seeming hopes and fears the pill first elicited, how the pill became a symbol of the 1960s sexual revolution without demonstrably affecting it, how feminists used the pill to push for an analogue for men as part of their gender-egalitarian agenda, and how reaction to the pill’s ill effects on many women contributed to the late-twentieth-century dissipation of respect for professional and institutional authority. She concludes with a review of modern young women’s feelings about the pill and a summary to the effect that the pill has fulfilled some but hardly all of the hopes and fears amid which it debuted. Understanding that the book is fundamentally, nonargumentatively pro-pill, one couldn’t ask for a better short history of its subject. --Ray Olson
http://www.filesonic.com/file/26309159/America%20and%20the%20Pill,%200465011527.7z
