This article is part of MissingA series of deceased for remarkable people whose deaths, starting in 1851, did not mention the Times.
Katharine Dexter McCormick, who was born in a life of wealth, left through marriage, could sit back and simply enjoyed the many advantages of running. Instead, she put her significant fortune – which fits her important will – to make life better for women.
An activist, charitable and benefactor, McCormick used her wealth strategically, mainly to undertake the basic research that led to the development of birth control pill in the late 1950s.
Prior to then, contraception in the United States was extremely limited, with bans on diaphragms and condoms. The advent of the pill has made it easier for women to plan when and whether they would have children and fueled the explosive sex revolution of the 1960s. Today, the pill, despite some side effects, is the most widely used reversible contraception in the United States.
McCormick’s interest in birth control began in the 1910s, when he learned about Margaret Sanger, the feminist leader imprisoned for opening the first clinical control of nation’s births. He shared Sanger’s strong belief that women should be able to record their own biological wings.
The two met in 1917 and soon cut off a complex plan to transfer diaphragms to the United States.
The disputes had been banned in accordance with the 1873 Comstock law, which made a federal crime to send or deliver by mail “obscene, intact or rubber” material – including pornography, contraceptives and objects used for abortion. (The law, which continues to prohibit the abortion -related mailing details, has received renewed attention since the federal right to abortion was overthrown in 2022.)
McCormick, who was fluent in French and German, traveled to Europe, where the disputes were common. He had studied Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was able to put a scientist in meetings with diaphragm makers. “He bought hundreds of devices and hired local sewing to sew them in dresses, evening underwear and coats,” according to a 2011 article in MIT Technology Review. “Then he had the clothing wrapped and packaged to trunks for shipment.”
She and the trunk of the atmosphere did it through the customs. If the authorities had stopped her, the article said they would have found “nothing but slightly swollen dresses that are in possession of a dedicated social, a woman who removes such confidence and overturning her porters so majestic that no one was suspected.”
From 1922 to 1925, McCormick was threatened by more than 1,000 diaphragms in the Sanger clinics.
After her husband died in 1947, she inherited a significant amount of money and asked Sanger tips on how to put it to use the promotion of research into contraception. In 1953, Sanger introduced her to Gregory Goodwin Pincus and Min-Chaueh Chang, researchers at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Massachusetts, who were trying to develop a safe, reliable oral contraceptive.
He was excited about their work and provided almost all funding – $ 2 million (about $ 23 million today) – required to develop the pill. He even moved to Worcester to watch and encourage their research. Pincus’s wife, Elizabeth, described McCormick as a warrior: “Little old woman who was not. She was a Grenadier.”
The Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill in 1960.
Katharine Moore Dexter was born in a wealthy, social activist family on August 27, 1875, in Dexter, Mich., West of Detroit. The city was named for its grandfather, Samuel W. Dexter, who founded it in 1824 and maintained an underground railway stop at his home, where Katharine was born. Her grandfather, Samuel Dexter, was secretary of the finance ministry under President John Adams.
Katharine and her older brother, Samuel T. Dexter, grew up in Chicago. Their mother, Josephine (Moore) Dexter, was a Boston Brahmin who supported women’s rights. Their father, Wirt Dexter, was a high -power lawyer who was president of the Chicago Bar Association and as director of the Chicago Railway, Burlington & Quincy. Also concession
He died when Katharine was 14 years old. A few years later, her brother died of meningitis while attending Harvard Law School. These first deaths showed her a career in medicine.
She watched MIT and specialized in biology, rare achievements for a woman of that time. She reached her own mind and successfully questioned a rule that female students had to wear hats at any time, arguing that they posed a risk of fire in science laboratories. He graduated in 1904 and planned to attend medical school.
But until then he had begun to date the impressive Stanley Robert McCormick, whom he had met in Chicago and who was a heir to a huge fortune built on a harvest engine that his father had invented. As a young lawyer, he helped negotiate a merger that made his family an important owner of the international Harvester. Until 1909, it was the fourth largest industrial company in America, measured in assets.
McCormick persuaded Katharine to marry him instead of going to Medical School. They got married at her mother’s Château in Switzerland and settled in Brookline, Mass.
But even before they got married, he had shown signs of mental instability and began to experience violent, paranoid illusions. He was hospitalized with what was later decided to be schizophrenia and remained under psychiatric care – mainly in Riven Rock, the McCormick family estate in Montecito, California – until his death. He never separated him and never remarried. They had no children.
Katharine McCormick spent decades immersed in personal, medical and legal differences with her husband’s brothers. They faced his treatment, his guardianship and ultimately his property, as described in detail in a 2007 article in Prologue magazine, a publication of the National Archives. He was his only beneficiary, inheriting about $ 40 million ($ 563 million in today’s dollars). Combined with $ 10 million (more than $ 222 million today) she inherited her mother, who made her one of the richest women in America.
As her husband’s illness consumed her personal life, McCormick threw herself into social reasons. He contributed financially to the voting movement, gave speeches and increased to the leadership to become a treasurer and vice president of the National American Gynecope. After the women won the right to vote in 1920, the club evolved into the League of Women Voters. McCormick became his vice president.
In 1927, she founded the Foundation of Neuroendocrine Research at Harvard Medical School, believing that a dysfunction of adrenal glands was responsible for her husband’s schizophrenia. It provides funding for two decades and has gained expertise in endocrinology that later informed its interest in developing an oral contraceptive.
After the FDA approved the pill, McCormick turned its attention to funding the first home campus for women in MIT when she studied there, women had no housing, one of the many factors that discouraged them to apply. “I believe that if we can get them properly housed,” he said, “that the best scientific education in our country will be open to them permanently.”
McCormick Hall, named for her husband, opened at the campridge campus of the Institute in 1963. At that time, women made up about 3 % of undergraduate students. Today, they are about 50 percent.
Until she died of a stroke on December 28, 1967, at her home in Boston, McCormick had played an important role in expanding opportunities for women in the 20th century. He was 92 years old.
In addition to a brief article in The Boston Globe, her death drew a minimal notice. Subsequent deceased births of the birth control researchers did not mention their role in their achievement.
In her will, she left $ 5 million in the Planned Parenthood Federation (more than $ 46 million today) and $ 1 million in Pincus’s laboratories (more than $ 9 million today). Earlier, she had donated her inheritance to Switzerland to the US government for use by her diplomatic mission in Geneva. Left most of her other property in MIT
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish