Katharine McCormick

Katharine Dexter McCormick (August 27, 1875 – December 28, 1967) was an American 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.

Early life and education

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. 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.

Dexter passed entrance exams to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1896, but was required to take three years of prerequisite classes to enroll. Arriving in 1899, Katharine graduated in 1904, earning a BSc in biology.

Marriage to Stanley McCormick

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. 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, an early label for what is now today known as schizophrenia. Katharine then lived with her mother in Boston, where the two became suffragists. Josephine had been supportive of Katharine's pursuit of higher education and marched in Boston's first suffrage parade.

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.

Women's rights activist

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. As a result, MIT's administration changed their policies.

McCormick argued that suffrage was necessary for guaranteeing women's political freedom, and that women deserved political equality because their abilities were equal to men's. She felt that the suffrage movement itself provided a valuable opportunity for service from women. These views of women's right to political equality were aligned with other wealthy suffragists of the time.

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 (NAWSA) and funded the association's publication the Woman's Journal. Because her donations arose from Stanley's estate, she needed court permission to make donations while he was alive. McCormick paid $6,000 to cancel debts from the Woman's Journal and engineered its controversial split from NAWSA. She provided NAWSA annual donations of one or two thousand in following years, with Dexter matching these. McCormick began replacing Alva Belmont as one of NAWSA's most substantial benefactors, diminishing Belmont's influence over the organization. In 1913, McCormick and Dexter helped organize the Bay State Suffrage Festival. McCormick helped push Alice Paul's Congressional Union out of NAWSA after accusing them of fundraising without McCormick's proper oversight. McCormick and NAWSA leader Carrie Chapman Catt disagreed with Paul's militant political activism, which was inspired by the English suffragettes, and McCormick was also concerned by the CU's growing share of what she saw as limited donor funds.

McCormick organized much of Catt's efforts to gain ratification for the Nineteenth Amendment. She backed Catt's plan for suffragists to display loyalty during World War I as an effort to earn Woodrow Wilson's support for their cause. 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 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. 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. 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.

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.