Katharine Dexter McCormick is a name that every woman today should know, because your life would probably be very different today if it wasn’t for her. Katharine funded what The New York Times called the “most sweeping sociomedical revolution in history. . . [whose] impact on the United States and other nations [is] almost too vast to analyze.” She was responsible for funding the reseach that discovered the birth control pill.
Before the feminist movement, arguments about birth control centered around family planning for married couples, population control and eugenics, not an individual woman’s control over her own body. Beginning in 1914, activist Margaret Sanger was the first to popularize the term “birth control”, which placed emphasis on a woman’s right to choose. At that time, suppositories and douches were the main methods of birth control in the US, with diaphragms being used in Europe.
Margaret Sanger, an American nurse and sex educator, believed that women needed to be able to decide when to have children in order for them to lead healthier lives and have more equal footing in society. Birth control was a hotly contested issue even then, making Margaret’s work very difficult. She was prosecuted for teaching about birth control in her clinics, and later for illegally smuggling diaphragms into the United States from Europe. Given this atmosphere it was impossible to get funding for research into safer and more effective means of birth control.
Katharine McCormick met Margaret through her involvement in the women’s suffrage movement. Katharine was vice president and treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage, and became vice president of the League of Women Voters after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.
In the early 20th century, Katharine’s attention and family fortune were largely focused on her husband, Stanley, who was suffering from schizophrenia (which was poorly understood at the time). Katharine, a biologist and the second woman to graduate from MIT, was convinced that a hormonal imbalance—a defective adrenal gland—had caused Stanley’s illness, but she had little say in his care. (A few years after his death, her theory was proven correct—research psychiatrists conclusively linked schizophrenia to a chemical imbalance.)
Stanley died in 1947, leaving the family’s vast fortune to Katharine. Even after paying more than 85% on inheritance taxes, she was now a millionaire with free reign over her wealth.
Even after the pill was approved, Katharine continued to provide funding to Pincus’s lab and research into improving the pill.
Today, the pill is the leading form of contraception, used by millions of women around the world.
Katharine is also responsible for funding women’s housing at her alma mater, MIT. At the time, the school had limited funding to provide housing for women, and there was even talk of turning it into an all-male school. Katharine single-handedly solved the problem by funding the building of Stanley McCormick Hall, an all-female dormitory named for her late husband.
Her generous donation had an inestimable impact on women’s education in the sciences: William Hecht, executive vice president of the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT said that “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.”
Though the name of Katharine McCormick is little-known today, she had a profound impact on our society and women’s rights. The world would be a very different place for women today without her passion and generosity.
Featured image of Katharine McCormick courtesy the MIT Museum.
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Keri is a blogger and digital marketing professional who founded Amazing Women In History in 2011.
I knew about Margaret Sanger, of course, but have never heard of Katharine. Today more than ever there is a need for information about the women who paved the way before us. Thanks for being a voice for them.
this is wonderful, but i believe that the third image you have of her is in fact Margaret Sanger, not Katharine McCormick.
You are absolutely correct!!! Thanks so much for pointing out my error, I appreciate it 😀
She certainly deserves to be in the history books and if my calculations are right, she had her first meeting with Pincus when she was 77.
A building in the small town of Elk Rapids, Michigan was owned by Katharine and deeded to our village in 1948. May I have permission to reprint this article in our local paper?
Sure thing, Dianne 🙂 All articles on this site are under a Creative Commons license, so you can reprint – just cite the source. Thanks 🙂
Hey! I am currently researching Katharine McCormick for a 10-minute historical drama play that I am writing and I wanted to know if you had recommendations of where to start my research other than Google or Wikipedia. I want to focus on her paving the way for women at MIT through the financing of Stanley McCormick Hall. I did see the quote in this article and reached out to both the MIT Alumni Association and the MIT Archives. Any advice? 🙂
I submitted KDM’s name and story to the NYTimes “Overlooked” project (to correct their “oversight” of important people (women) in their obituary coverage). Someone then pointed out that maybe the Times actually DID publish an Obit, so I looked and ONLY could find articles about the beneficiaries of KDM’s estate, but I could find no obituary. Is this surprising? And is it surprising the NYT has NOT corrected this situation? Or should we be satisfied by the numerous articles in all sorts of publications about this incredibly great suffragist/activist for women/leader in so many arenas of life?
In a gender studies course on “Women Transforming Society and Religion,” our assignment this semester is to write a NYTimes obit for an “influential but not famous” woman who did not get into that paper. Yes, it is surprising she didn’t even make “Overlooked” project.