Earlier in 2020, Herstory looked back at the life of the man behind the creation of the birth control pill, but Pincus and Chang could have done nothing without funding, and that came in large part from Katharine Dexter McCormick. Today, in honor of her birthday, we will look at her life as an activist, philanthropist, and scientist.
McCormick’s parents were Wirt Dexter, a prominent Chicago lawyer, and Josephine Moore Dexter, a former schoolteacher turned mother and suffragette. Dexter, Michigan, where McCormick was born on August 27, 1875, was named after its founder and her grandfather, Samuel W. Dexter, who, along with her father, had been a noted abolitionist. The family lived in her grandfather’s mansion in Dexter, called Gordon Hall, but they also lived in Chicago, where her father was a prominent lawyer and had a house built.
McCormick became the second woman to graduate from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1904, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in biology. At the time, there was no housing for women on MIT’s campus, so she lived with her mother, who must have moved at some point after her husband’s death. Both women were part of the Massachusetts Women’s Alliance, which was fighting for women’s right to vote. At MIT, McCormick found a double standard in the dress code. She fought against the rule that women must wear hats at all times, something she found dangerous as well as sexist, since she had to perform lab experiments involving fire for some of her coursework.
McCormick married the heir to the International Harvester Company, Stanley McCormick, in 1905. Her husband had helped build up the successful family business into a worldwide powerhouse. But after only two years of marriage, Stanley was diagnosed with schizophrenia. McCormick turned to her biological education to try to understand his mental illness and decided that they couldn’t risk passing on the disease, so they never had children. By 1909, she was fighting with her husband’s family over not only his share of the business but also his treatment by them and the healthcare system. It was a fight she would continue until his death in 1947.
McCormick directly helped in the fight for political equality in the USA. She served in various offices of the International and the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, such as corresponding secretary, auditor, treasurer, and finally vice president. After the 19th Amendment, she helped found the League of Women Voters, which is still going strong today in many communities. She helped birth control advocates smuggle illegal aids such as diaphragms into the USA using the family estate in Geneva, Switzerland.
While she physically fought for women’s rights, most of her money went toward projects that her family could approve of, such as research into schizophrenia, founding the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School in 1927, and hosting the delegates of the 1927 World Population Conference. The earthquake of 1925 in Santa Barbara, where one of the McCormick estates was located, forced her to return there to rebuild but also to oversee her husband’s care. She couldn’t have physical contact with him because his illness made him lash out as women, but she kept on top of what his all-male doctors and support staff were doing. When her husband died in 1947, she inherited his part of his family’s wealth. McCormick started to turn her philanthropic eye to other causes, though she continued more traditional funding as well.
In 1947, in honor of her work on behalf of the new Santa Barbara Museum of Art, a gallery was named in honor of her husband. After her death, she donated their home to the museum, and it now serves as the museum’s Ridley-Tree Education Center.
In 1948, McCormick donated her house in Elk Rapids, Michigan, Island House, to the city, which converted it into a library that continues to serve the community. The house had been built by a business partner of McCormick’s father and through a series of misfortunes ended up being purchased by her mother in 1926, who passed it on to her upon her death. In 1950, McCormick donated Gordon Hall, the family home she’d been born and raised in, to the University of Michigan, though today the house is owned by the Dexter Area Historical Society.
In 1956, McCormick took a big risk in the fight for women’s equality by turning some of her philanthropic work toward the development of birth control. She helped fund the research into both developing and determining the effects of the pill developed by the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. Since her undergraduate days at MIT, McCormick was interested in endocrinology and mental health issues related to biology. Development of a birth control method that most women could take covered all of her scientific interests, something her friend Margaret Sanger had been talking with her about since they met in 1917.
In the early 1950s McCormick donated her private home in Cambridge, Massachusetts to serve as a residence hall for women who wanted to attend MIT, which had previously had no women’s residential facilities; at that time, women made up only 3% of the undergraduate student population. In 1959, McCormick gave back to her alma mater in the form of McCormick Hall, technically named for her husband. The hall was created to be a residence for women students and was built in two stages under McCormick’s guidance in 1963 and 1967. The addition of a dedicated housing space for women enabled women to increase their enrollment at MIT dramatically and prove they were as capable as men.
McCormick died in her sleep on December 28, 1967; she’d had a stroke. Her legacy lives in the more than $60 million in donations she established at MIT, Stanford University School of Medicine, and for the Planned Parenthood Federation. She also gave to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art as well as the Chicago Art Institute. In 1998, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, then into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 2000.