Katharine Dexter McCormick and the Pill
McCormick Funded Most of the Research for the Birth Control Pill
Born August 27, 1875, Katharine Dexter McCormick led a privileged life with a lawyer father. Her father died when she was fourteen years old and the family moved to Boston. Her brother died a few years after the move from meningitis.
McCormick developed an interest in MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) at an early age. She had heard about the school and even wrote about it in her English class. However, poor marks on the paper from the English teacher convinced McCormick she was inadequately prepared for MIT. In order to overcome this feeling of inadequacy, McCormick attended MIT as a special student for three years before enrolling as a regular student in 1899.
McCormick graduated MIT in 1904 at the age of twenty-eight with a science degree with a major in biology.
Her plans to attend medical school went by the wayside when she married Stanly McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune. They were married at the Dexter family chateau in Switzerland in 1904.
Stanley McCormick’s mental health had been declining since he graduated in 1895 from Princeton. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and only four years after their marriage he was moved to one of the McCormick’s estates in Montecito, California. Stanley was diagnosed with a catatonic form of dementia praecox and the following year was declared legally incompetent. His guardianship was split between Katharine and the McCormick family.
McCormick was determined to lead a productive life. She became involved with the women’s suffrage movement as a speaker on women’s voting rights. In Nantasket, suffragists were forbidden to speak or hold a rally on the beach. Their solution was to wade into the water with their “Votes for Women” banners and spoke from the sea.
Through her work with suffragettes such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Margaret Sanger, McCormick became interested in birth control issues. She smuggled diaphragms from Europe to Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau in New York City.
In 1927, McCormick, convinced that a defective adrenal gland caused her husband’s schizophrenia, began studying the science of endocrinology. She also hosted the World Population Conference in her home in Geneva. McCormick established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation and also partially funded the publication of Endocrinology magazine.
Coming Into a Fortune
Ten years later in 1937, McCormick’s mother died leaving an estimated ten million dollars to the almost-sixty year old McCormick. Ten years after that, in 1947, Stanley McCormick died leaving in excess of thirty-five million dollars to his widow. Although much of the money she was left went to inheritance taxes, McCormick still had enough finances remaining to support herself as well as fund research into oral contraception.
Funding Birth Control Research
McCormick’s knowledge of biology and endocrinology led her to believe that birth control in the form of a pill could be available for women. Sanger herself introduced McCormick to Gregory Pincus whose progressive studies into fertilization and hormones led him to experiment with progesterone to prevent ovulation in rabbits. However, the big drug company which had been supporting him up to that point, refused to fund him any further as they saw no profit in the work he was conducting.
However, McCormick was so impressed with the findings in Pincus’ research that she wrote him a $40,000 check on the spot. Quite a lump sum of money at that time, McCormick would write many more such checks to ensure her vision for an oral contraceptive for women was brought to fruition.
McCormick and Pincus both convinced Dr. John Rock to conduct human trials. And in 1957, the Food and Drug Administration approved the Pill for menstrual disorders. It wasn’t until 1960 that contraception was added to its indications.
McCormick continued to fund birth control research through the sixties.
McCormick Hall at MIT
As a final legacy, McCormick made a contribution to MIT to build a dormitory for women. Although MIT had always been coed, they had limited housing for their female students. An ardent supporter of MIT all her life, McCormick wanted other women interested in technology and science to have available to them the same quality of education she herself and enjoyed.
McCormick Hall blasted the myth and appearance that MIT was not coed. It enabled more women to attend the higher learning center and increased the number of women-to-men graduates ratio at MIT from three percent to forty percent.
When Katharine McCormick died on December 28, 1967 at the age of 92, her contribution to the creation and advancement of the birth control pill was not recognized in her obituary. This was due to the scientists and doctors involved being spotlighted for the development of the pill. McCormick’s contribution to this cause has been brought to light in recent years.
The book “Katharine Dexter McCormick, Pioneer for Women’s Rights” was published July 30, 2003 by Praeger Publishers.
Sources:
McCormick funded most of the research for the Pill
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