Elaine Tyler May

Her latest book, America and the Pill, about the advent and impact of the birth control pill, comes out in May. As she explained to me, she feels that the Pill is a crucial part of women's history, but it's also a part of her own personal history - both her parents were involved in the development of the Pill. Professor Tyler May, a Fulbright scholar and the President-elect of the Organization of American Historians, is a perfect example of how to study women and feminism in a range of disciplines, all of which are connected - intersectionality is the name of her game.

I have some personal favorites that come from my work in women's reproductive rights. Some of them are obviously very well known, people like Margaret Sanger, but some of them are less well known, people like Katherine McCormick, who along with Sanger was a mother of the Pill. She was quite an amazing woman: a feminist early on in the early twentieth century, and one of the major activists involved in the women's suffrage movement. She was one of the first women to graduate from MIT, so she was a scientist at a time when very few women were.
She married into a huge amount of wealth, and shortly after her marriage her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and she used a lot of those resources to invest in research into mental illness. After he died, she turned her attention to reproductive rights, because she and Margaret Sanger had known each other for decades. It was a time when nobody, literally nobody, would put a penny into contraceptive research. In the 1950s the government wouldn't touch it, the pharmaceuticals wouldn't touch it - it was considered some kind of scandalous exercise and they were afraid of public opinion. So Sanger and McCormick got together and launched the research for the Pill: Sanger had the connections and McCormick had the scientific knowledge and the money. So really, it was Catherine McCormick's money and energy that brought us the birth control pill.

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