Katharine Dexter McCormick | |
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 McCormick on April 22, 1913 | |
| Born | Katharine Moore Dexter August 27, 1875 |
| Died | December 28, 1967 (aged 92) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Katharine Dexter McCormick (August 27, 1875 – December 28, 1967) was a U.S. suffragist, philanthropist and, after her husband's death, heir to a substantial part of the McCormick family fortune. She funded most of the research necessary to develop the first birth control pill.
Katharine Dexter was born on August 27, 1875, in Dexter, Michigan, in her grandparents' mansion, Gordon Hall. Her grandfather, the judge Samuel W. Dexter, son of politician Samuel Dexter, had settled and founded the town in 1824. She grew up in Chicago where her father, Wirt Dexter, was a prominent lawyer and philanthropic leader. [1] Following the early death of her father of a heart attack at age 57 when she was 14 years old, she and her mother Josephine moved to Boston in 1890. Four years later, her brother Samuel died of meningitis at age 25. [1]
Dexter passed entrance exams to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1896, but was required to take three years of prerequisite classes to enroll. [1] Arriving in 1899, Katharine graduated from the in 1904, earning a BSc in biology.
She planned to attend medical school, but instead married Stanley Robert McCormick, the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick and heir to the International Harvester fortune, on September 15, 1904. [2] In September 1905, they moved into a house in Brookline, Massachusetts. The couple did not have any children.
Stanley graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 1895 where he had also been a gifted athlete on the varsity tennis team. He had been showing signs of progressively worsening mental illness. In September 1906, he was hospitalized for over a year at McLean Hospital and was originally diagnosed with dementia praecox, [3] an early label for what is now today known as schizophrenia. [4]
In June 1908, Stanley was moved to the McCormicks' Riven Rock estate in Montecito, California, where his schizophrenic older sister, Mary Virginia, had lived from 1898 to 1904 before being placed in a Huntsville, Alabama, sanitarium. While there, he was examined by the prominent German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin and diagnosed with the catatonic form of dementia praecox. In 1909, Stanley was declared legally incompetent and his guardianship divided between Katharine and the McCormick family. [4]
Katharine's plea for gender equality was apparent from early on. As an undergraduate at MIT, she confronted administration officials. MIT required that women wear hats at all times, including while at work. Katharine initially complied, then later refused. She argued that it was a fire hazard for feathered hats to be worn in laboratories. [5] As a result, MIT's administration changed their policies.
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 efforts to gain ratification for the Nineteenth Amendment. While working with Catt, she met other social activists, including Mary Dennett and Margaret Sanger. Katharine met Sanger in 1917, and later that year joined the Committee of 100, a group of women who practiced promoting the legalization of birth control. During World War I, Katharine also worked as a chairwoman of the association's War Service Department. In addition, she was a member of the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense. [3] In 1920, after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, McCormick became the vice president of the League of Women Voters.
Throughout the 1920s, McCormick worked with Sanger on birth control issues. McCormick smuggled more than 1,000 diaphragms from Europe to New York City to Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau. [6] She scheduled meetings with major European diaphragm manufacturers in cities such as Rome and Paris, and used her language skills and biology background to pose as a French or German scientist and place large orders for the devices. They were shipped to her family chateau, Prangins Castle, outside Geneva, where they were sewn into the linings of fashionable coats and other garments. She smuggled them past U.S. customs agents in New York, having successfully disguised them as the spoils of extravagant European shopping sprees for high-end fashions. She made these trips every summer from 1922 to 1925, retiring only after the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake forced her to redirect her attention to rebuilding her husband's estate and devote her energy to helping direct his care. [7]
In 1927, McCormick 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.
Inspired by her husband's diagnosis, Katharine was determined to find a cure. Believing that Stanley's illness was a defective adrenal gland, and could be treated with hormone treatment, she established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation from 1927 to 1947 at Harvard Medical School, and subsidized the publication of the journal Endocrinology. Originally called the "Stanley R. McCormick Memorial Foundation for Neuro- Endocrine Research Corporation", it was the first U.S institute to launch research on the link between endocrinology and mental illness. [8] She also created a research center for the care of the mentally ill at Worcester State Hospital. Her mother Josephine died on November 16, 1937, at age 91 leaving her an estate of more than 10 million dollars. Stanley died on January 19, 1947, at age 72 leaving an estate of over 35 million dollars to Katharine. She spent five years settling his estate, 85% of which went to pay inheritance taxes.
In 1953 McCormick met Gregory Goodwin Pincus through Margaret Sanger. Pincus had been working on developing a hormonal birth control method since 1951 and his own research laboratory, the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. [9] The drug company that supported Pincus stopped funding his pioneering research because he had yet to make a profit. As a result, McCormick started to fund Pincus's research foundation. The donations started at $100,000 annually, and later $150,000-$180,000 up until her death in 1967. [9] In sum, McCormick had provided $2 million (around $20 million today) of her own money for the development of the oral contraceptive pill. [7] The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale of the Pill in 1957 for menstrual disorders and added contraception to its indications in 1960. Even after the pill was approved, she continued to fund Pincus's lab and research on ways into improving birth control research through the 1960s. [10]
After the successful development and approval of the contraceptive pill, Katharine yielded her attention to the lack of housing for women at MIT. [11] MIT was always coeducational, but because it could provide housing to only some fifty female students, 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 (a physicist 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...".
In order to provide female students a permanent place at MIT, she donated the money to found Stanley McCormick Hall, an all female dormitory that would allow MIT to house 200 female students. Katharine's funding made a tremendous impact on the number of women at MIT, increasing the number from 3% to 40%. [12] 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."
McCormick was also an avid supporter of the arts, particularly to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art where she was one of the Museum's founding members, vice president and donor of the Stanley McCormick Gallery in 1942. Sharing vice president duties with fellow philanthropist and art collector Wright S. Ludington, McCormick served on the Museum's Buildings Committee and was responsible for the hiring of the renowned Chicago architect, David Adler, to convert the old post office into the art museum.
She died on December 28, 1967, in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 92. Her will provided $5 million to the Stanford University School of Medicine to support female physicians, $5 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which funded the Katharine Dexter McCormick Library in Manhattan, New York City, and $1 million to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. In addition, McCormick made arrangements for $500,000 to be donated to the Art Institute of Chicago and the donation of nine important impressionist paintings to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which included three major landscapes by Claude Monet. [13] Along with these paintings, McCormick also donated her residence, which is now known as the Ridley-Tree Education Center. It is currently used by the Museum for child and adult art classes. [14]
Katharine McCormick is a character in T.C. Boyle's novel Riven Rock (1998), which is mainly about her husband Stanley's mental illness.
McCormick was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1998. [15] She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2000.
There is a dorm named after her husband at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [16] [17]
Margaret Higgins Sanger, also known as Margaret Sanger Slee, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. She popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The combined oral contraceptive pill (COCP), often referred to as the birth control pill or colloquially as "the pill", is a type of birth control that is designed to be taken orally by women. It is the oral form of combined hormonal contraception. The pill contains two important hormones: a progestin and estrogen. When taken correctly, it alters the menstrual cycle to eliminate ovulation and prevent pregnancy.
Gregory Goodwin Pincus was an American biologist and researcher who co-invented the combined oral contraceptive pill.
Edris Roushan Rice-Wray was an American pioneer in medical research who was influential in studying the oral contraceptive pill. Rice-Way headed a large-scale clinical trial of the first birth control pill in the late 1950s in Puerto Rico.
Edith Rockefeller McCormick was an American socialite, daughter of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller.
The history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can be traced back to the 1861 incorporation of the "Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Society of Natural History" led primarily by William Barton Rogers.
Riven Rock, published in 1998, is a novel by the American author T. Coraghessan Boyle. It concerns the life of Stanley McCormick, a son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper, and Stanley's devoted wife, Katherine McCormick, daughter of Wirt Dexter, a prominent Chicago lawyer.
Blanche Ames Ames was an American artist, political activist, inventor, writer, and prominent supporter of women's suffrage and birth control.
The McCormick family of Chicago and Virginia is an American family of Scottish and Scotch-Irish descent that attained prominence and fortune starting with the invention of the McCormick Reaper, a machine that revolutionized agriculture and established the modern grain trade by beginning the mechanization of the harvesting of grain. Through the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company and later, the International Harvester Company and other investments, the McCormicks became one of the wealthiest families in America. The name became ubiquitous in agriculture starting in the 19th century and the press dubbed the McCormicks the "Reaper Kings". Later generations expanded into media and publishing, finance, and real estate. Various family members were well known as civic leaders. The family is Presbyterian.
Nancy Maria "Nettie" McCormick was an American philanthropist. Through marriage, she became a member of the prominent McCormick family.
John Charles Rock was an American obstetrician and gynecologist. He is best known for the major role he played in the development of the first birth control pill.
Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn was an American feminist social reformer and a leader of the suffrage movement in the United States. Hepburn served as president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association before joining the National Woman's Party. In 1923 Hepburn formed the Connecticut Branch of the American Birth Control League with two of her friends, Mrs. George Day and Mrs. M. Toscan Bennett. She was the mother and namesake of actress Katharine Hepburn and the grandmother and namesake of actress Katharine Houghton.
The birth control movement in the United States was a social reform campaign beginning in 1914 that aimed to increase the availability of contraception in the U.S. through education and legalization. The movement began in 1914 when a group of political radicals in New York City, led by Emma Goldman, Mary Dennett, and Margaret Sanger, became concerned about the hardships that childbirth and self-induced abortions brought to low-income women. Since contraception was considered to be obscene at the time, the activists targeted the Comstock laws, which prohibited distribution of any "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" materials through the mail. Hoping to provoke a favorable legal decision, Sanger deliberately broke the law by distributing The Woman Rebel, a newsletter containing a discussion of contraception. In 1916, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, but the clinic was immediately shut down by police, and Sanger was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Birth control in the United States is available in many forms. Some of the forms available at drugstores and some retail stores are male condoms, female condoms, sponges, spermicides, over-the-counter progestin-only contraceptive pills, and over-the-counter emergency contraception. Forms available at pharmacies with a doctor's prescription or at doctor's offices are oral contraceptive pills, patches, vaginal rings, diaphragms, shots/injections, cervical caps, implantable rods, and intrauterine devices (IUDs). Sterilization procedures, including tubal ligations and vasectomies, are also performed.
The first large-scale human trial of the birth control pill was conducted by Gregory Pincus and John Rock in 1955 in Puerto Rico. Before the drug was approved as safe in the mainland U.S., many Puerto Rican women were used as test subjects. These trials are a major component in the history of the development of female oral contraceptives, occurring in between initial small trial testing on the east coast and the release of the drug for public consumption. As a result, women gained more independence as they were able to delay pregnancies. The trials are controversial because the Puerto Rican women were uninformed of the potential health and safety risks of the drug. There was a large amount of criticism coming from feminist circles surrounding the trial.
Gordon Hall, also known as the Judge Samuel W. Dexter House, is a private house located at 8341 Island Lake Road in Dexter, Michigan. It was designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1958 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. The house is unique in Michigan for its balance, large scale, and massive hexastyle portico. The structure is also significant as the dwelling of Judge Samuel W. Dexter, a pioneering Michigan resident and land baron who had a substantial impact on early development of Washtenaw County and other sections of the state. The house was later owned by Dexter's granddaughter Katharine Dexter McCormick, a pioneering research scientist, suffragist, and philanthropist. In its early days, Gordon Hall hosted at least two, and possibly three United States presidents, and it was almost certainly a stop along the Underground Railroad.
Helen Katharine Forbes was a Californian artist and arts educator specializing in etching, murals and painting. She is best known for western landscapes, portrait paintings, and her murals with the Treasury Section of Fine Arts and Work Progress Administration (WPA). Forbes was skilled in painting in oil, watercolor, and egg tempera. She painted landscapes of Mexico, Mono Lake and the Sierras in the 1920s, desert scenes of Death Valley in the 1930s, and portraits and still-lifes.
Riven Rock is a residential subdivision in the unincorporated area of Montecito, California near Santa Barbara, California. The Riven Rock subdivision is located on the former Riven Rock Estate.
Ruth Taubenhaus "Toby" Gross was an American pediatrician. She was the first woman to receive an endowed professorship at Stanford University when she was named the Katharine Dexter and Stanley McCormick Memorial Professor of Pediatrics.
Leslee L. Subak is an American urogynecologist and reproductive surgeon. She is the Katharine Dexter McCormick and Stanley McCormick Memorial Professor and chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford University School of Medicine.
McCormick Hall is named after Stanley A. McCormick, the husband of Katherine[ sic ] Dexter McCormick '04, who was the benefactor of the building. [...] Katharine Dexter McCormick, who is most responsible for the construction of the building, ...
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