In terms of feminism and women’s rights, two pivotal moments of history that spring to mind are women getting the vote and the invention of the birth control pill. We may take both these things for granted these days, but try and imagine a world without them... go on. Imagine it. Sucks, right? So today I would like to honour a woman who not only made waves in science and technology through her philanthropy; but also helped develop the birth control pill and was a life long suffragette and woman’s rights campaigner. I take my hat off to her, although mine is inferior to her fabulous millinery styling....
Katherine McCormick 1875 - 1967
Katherine (Nee: Dexter) McCormick was born Michigan in 1875. She had a good start in life being raised by a women’s rights' activist mother and a lawyer father who, himself had campaigned to abolish slavery. Being imbibed with social justice from a young age was one motivating factor in her life; the other was the untimely death of her brother and father from meningitis and a heart attack respectively. This gave her an ambition to study medicine. She was awarded her biology degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1904, only the second woman to do so and the first with a science award.
Her plans for medical school were put on hold indefinitely though, as she fell in love and married International Harvester heir Stanley McCormick. Alas within two years of marriage, Stanley had developed schizophrenia and five years into marriage he was declared mentally incompetent and institutionalised. This meant that his sizable fortune was passed on to Katherine and his family (she eventually inherited his $35 million estate when he died in 1947, which added to her own fortune of $10 million). In 1909 she joined the US suffrage movement, speaking at the first outdoor rally. She became vice president and treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and organized much of the efforts to get women the vote in the US.
In the 1920s she met Margaret Sanger (who went on to start Planned Parenthood in the US), who had an interest in developing birth control. She and Katherine dedicated the next two years promoting the development of contraception, even smuggling diaphragms from Europe to New York!
Once Katherine had inherited her fortune she didn’t fritter it away, frittering time and money was not her style. In 1953 Katherine met Gregory Goodwin Pincus, a scientist that had been working on developing the first hormonal method of birth control. Katherine agreed to fund Pincus’ research, and she also persuaded another scientist, John Rock, to conduct the first human clinical trials on the pill. Katherine provided almost the entire $2 million that was necessary to develop and test the pill for human use. She didn’t stop there though, her philanthropic ventures included establishing the Neuro-Endocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School, a $5 million donation to Planned Parenthood, and a $1 million dollar donation to Worcester Hospital for a research and care facility for the mentally ill. In addition, she supported women’s education at MIT by donating money to build the Stanley McCormick Hall – the first all female halls at MIT capable of housing 200 female students.
Katherine died in 1967 at the ripe old age of 92, having lived to see the effect that the pill was beginning to have on women. Her philanthropic ways carried on even after her death, as see bequeathed $5 million to Stanford University School of Medicine to support female doctors; $5 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and $1 million to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. This means that she helped to save many lives but more importantly helped improve the quality of life of literally millions of women. Spare her a thought next time you pop one of your pills.
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