Fifty shades of colour motion

If you read one book this week

The Marauders by Tom Cooper (Crown) R350

This stunning debut crime romp is set in a post-Katrina Louisiana shrimping community now devastated by the Gulf BP disaster. There's a touch of Carl Hiaasen in the characterisation - a one-armed junkie treasure hunter, a swindling oil company rep, drug-smuggling psycho twins - but the action's deep in Elmore Leonard and Donald E Westlake territory. It's one helluva deep-fried Southern freak show.

The issue

Hold me back (with Japanese bondage rope) but cinemas the world over appear to be girding their loins for the stampede this weekend of lust-crazed women all hot for the film version of the EL James bonkbuster Fifty Shades of Grey. Margaret Sanger would no doubt have approved. The American birth control campaigner, who opened the world's first contraception clinic in 1916, is one of the central figures in Jonathan Eig's engrossing history, The Birth of the Pill: How Four Pioneers Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (Macmillan). Sanger had radical views. She believed women should have more pleasure from sex and - perhaps more controversially - that the feeble-minded and degenerate should not be allowed to breed.

But her most progressive conviction was that there should be a contraceptive that a woman could "swallow every morning with her orange juice or while brushing her teeth, with or without the consent of the man with whom she was sleeping". With backing from an extremely wealthy feminist friend, Katharine McCormick, Sanger enlisted the help of two biologists to research and develop the pill.

America was still fiercely conservative by the time Enovid hit the shelves so it was marketed as a drug to regulate menstruation. (The warning on the label did note, however, that regular use prevented ovulation.) By the time the US Supreme Court finally struck down state laws prohibiting contraception for married couples in 1965, 6.5-million US women were on the pill. The genie was out the bottle and the sexual revolution was here.

For an idea of the world banished by the pill, Jane Robinson's heartbreaking social history, In the Family Way: Illegitimacy Between the Great War and the Swinging Sixties (Viking), is greatly recommended. Not too long ago, unmarried mothers were considered immoral, single fathers feckless and bastard children inherently defective. They were hidden away from friends and relatives as guilty secrets, punished by society and denied their places in their families. Here are the voices from the work houses, the Magdalene laundries, the child migration schemes and other shameful "welfare" homes where prejudice prevailed.

The bottom line

"All that most other animals need to function as a female are some discreet internal plumbing and inconspicuous mammary glands, but something much more radical has happened to human females." - Curvology: The Origins and Power of Female Body Shape by David Bainbridge (Portobello)