The company was G.D. Searle. The product was Enovid. And the most significant year was 1960.
But according to a narrative by the archivists of proponent Margaret Higgins Sanger’s official papers, the birth control pill got its start at a 1951 dinner party hosted by Abraham Stone, medical director of Planned Parenthood. At that party, Sanger — who would supply the motivation and momentum to support the contraceptive's development — met Gregory Pincus, one of the scientists who would create it.
Historians record that The Pill's creators would turn, almost immediately, to Chicago pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle for money, corporate support and distribution channels to put The Pill in purses and medicine cabinets around the world.
Records cited by historian Lara V. Marks in her book “Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill” show Searle turned down the funding request in 1951. Yet years later, the company would become involved in contraceptive trials for Enovid, a drug that would change women's health, careers, the economy, education, society and religious conversation.
G.D. Searle released it in 1957 as a treatment for gynecological disorders, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved its use as a contraceptive in 1960. The Pill proved to be highly effective from the outset.
Searle's Enovid innovations are in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History — a 5-milligram dosage made in a short clear bottle from the 1950s and the instantly recognizable flat clam-shell round plastic case with a foil backing that came out in 1976.
To drug companies, the popularity of The Pill was innovative in leading to a new market idea: It proved that otherwise healthy patients would be willing to take medication for an extended period of time. Pill manufacturers learned to gain distance on competitors by developing unique packaging to build brand loyalty.
Use of The Pill spread first among married women after FDA approval but began to reach young, single women in the late 1960s as states lowered the age of consent and extended “mature minor” decisions, Harvard researchers Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz found.
The Pill created a social multiplier effect, Goldin and Katz found. Tied to the delay of marriage generally, it increased women's chances of attending professional school, embarking on a career and finding a spouse who shared career aspirations.
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