Katharine Dexter McCormick (August 27, 1875 – December 28, 1967) was a U.S. biologist, suffragette, philanthropist and, after her husband's death, heir to a substantial part of the McCormick fortune. She is well remembered today for funding most of the research necessary to develop the birth control pill.

Katherine Dexter was born in Dexter, Michigan, in her grandparents' mansion, Gordon Hall. Following the deaths of her father and brother, she and her mother Josephine moved to Boston. In 1904 McCormick was one of the first women to earn a BSc degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); she majored in biology. She planned to continue her studies, but chose to marry Stanley McCormick, youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, an heir to the International Harvester fortune. They married at the Dexter family chateau in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in September 1904.

Two years after they married Stanley was afflicted with schizophrenia. In 1906 he had to resign his position in his father's company, and in 1909 he was declared legally incompetent. The couple did not have any children.

In 1909 McCormick spoke at the first outdoor rally for woman suffrage in Massachusetts. She became vice president and treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and funded the association's publication the Woman's Journal. McCormick organized much of Carrie Chapman Catt's effort to gain ratification for the Nineteenth Amendment. While working with Catt, she met other social activists, including Mary Dennett and Margaret Sanger. In 1920 McCormick became the vice president of the League of Women Voters.

Throughout the 1920's McCormick worked with Sanger on birth control issues, McCormick smuggled diaphragms from Europe to New York for Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau, and in 1927 she hosted a reception of delegates attending the 1927 World Population Conference at her home in Geneva. In that year McCormick also turned to the science of endocrinology to aid her husband, believing that a defective adrenal gland caused his schizophrenia. She established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School, and subsidized the publication of the journal Endocrinology. Stanley died in 1947 and McCormick spent 3 year settling his estate to pay inheritence taxes.

In 1951 McCormick met with Gregory Goodwin Pincus. Pincus had been working on developing a hormonal birth control method since the 1930s. McCormick agreed to fund Pincus research into oral contraception and in 1954 she and Pincus got Dr. John Rock to conduct human trials. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale of the Pill in 1960. McCormick had provided almost the entire $2 million it took to develop and test the oral contraceptive pill. She continued to fund birth control research through the 1960s.

While MIT was always coeducational it could only provide housing to about fifty female students. Therefore, many of the women who attended MIT had to be local residents. However, the place of women at the Institute was far from secure as Katharine Dexter told Dorothy Weeks (physcist and mathematician who earned her master's and doctorate from MIT) that she had lived "in a cold fear that suddenly--unexpectedly--Tech might exclude women... " Therefore to give women a permanent place at MIT, she would donate the money to found Stanley McCormick Hall, an all female dormitory that would allow MIT to house 200 female students. The ramifications of the hall are best stated by William Hecht '61, executive vice president of the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT when he said, "the visible presence of women at MIT helped open up the science and engineering professions to a large part of the population that before had been excluded. It demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that at MIT men and women are equal."

Following her death in 1967, her will provided $5 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which funded the Katharine Dexter McCormick Library in New York City, and $1 million to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology.

Katharine McCormick is a character in T.C. Boyle's novel Riven Rock (1998), which is mainly about her husband Stanley's mental illness.

She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2000.

Reference

• Tuck, S. L. McCormick, Katharine Dexter. American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000.

Further reading

• Armond Fields: Katharine Dexter McCormick: Pioneer for Women's Rights (2003) ( ISBN 0275980049 )

External links

• Correspondence between Margaret Sanger and McCormick
• History of McCormick Hall
• MIT Spectrum article on Katharine Dexter McCormick

1875 births | 1967 deaths | American philanthropists | People from Michigan | McCormick family