HUNDREDS of millions of women across the world should today be commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of an extraordinary pioneering woman scientist and philanthropist who almost single-handedly paid for the development of the oral contraceptive pill.
Katharine McCormick was a biologist, an early campaigner for women’s rights, a benefactor of science, an arts patron and a multi-millionaire who died on 28 December, 1967, in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of 92.
You can take your pick of her greatest achievements – being only the second woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), helping to pilot the 19th amendment through Congress to guarantee votes for women across the USA, or establishing science facilities to research mental illness, or providing the funds that enabled the invention of safe oral contraceptives, otherwise known as ‘The Pill’. In other words, a woman whose life should be commemorated and celebrated. Instead, the anniversary is being largely ignored both in the USA and elsewhere, which seems an incredible shame given the effect of the pill on global society.
WHO EXACTLY WAS SHE?
She was born Katharine Dexter in Dexter, Michigan, the village being named after her the family of her grandfather, Judge Samuel Dexter, who developed the area and built her birthplace, Gordon Hall, as his home mansion where he entertained dignitaries such as visiting Presidents and also harboured fleeing black slaves — he was a staunch abolitionist.
Her family were steeped in American history — her great grandfather was a Senator who gave the eulogy in the Senate for George Washington.
Katharine seems to have inherited her progressive politics from old Judge Samuel, her own father Wirt, a lawyer, dying of a heart attack when she was just 14.
His death caused the family to move to Boston where Katharine studied biology at MIT. Her elder brother, also Samuel, died of meningitis at 25, leaving her the inheritor of the family wealth. She had planned to attend medical school, but instead met and married Stanley Robert McCormick, whose family ran the giant International Harvester business. The McCormicks were well connected — Stanley’s sister-in-law was the daughter of the richest American of them all, John D Rockefeller.
Sadly, there was a tendency to mental illness in the McCormick family, and Katharine would later become convinced it was hormonal.
SHE WAS AN EARLY FEMINIST?
Even as a student at MIT she had led protests for women’s rights, refusing to wear a hat as demanded by the Institute’s authorities. She pointed out that a feather hat, for instance, would be dangerous in the laboratory, and duly won her first victory for equality.
Sadly, Stanley McCormick developed what we now know as schizophrenia, and he was placed in a sanatorium, with Katharine and his family given power of attorney over his affairs.
She was by now convinced that his mental illness was linked to a hormonal imbalance in the brain and tried to fund research into it, but the medical establishment would have none of it — it would be many years later that she would be proven correct.
At this crucial point in 1909, she was freed up to take part in the cause of votes for women, and she was soon one of its leaders in the USA, becoming vice-president and treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
She also developed many connections, including a lifelong friendship with Margaret Sanger, the leading proponent of birth control.
The 19th Amendment that banned the states and federal government from prohibiting voters on grounds of gender became their focus, and having been introduced into Congress as long ago as 1878, it was duly adopted in 1920.
DID SHE REALLY PAY FOR ‘THE PILL’?
Yes, she did. Her friendship with Margaret Sanger saw McCormick openly campaign for birth control and she risked imprisonment by secretly smuggling diaphragms into the USA.
After Stanley died in 1947, she inherited his wealth and decided to put it to good use. As well as establishing research facilities to study endocrinology — the science of hormones — and an all-women facility at MIT, her greatest contribution was to finance the work of Dr Gregory Goodwin Pincus, the biologist who, with his friend Dr John Rock, developed the oral contraceptive pill in the 1950s. McCormick increased their research funding by the astonishing factor of 50, and she was rewarded by living long enough to see the Pill approved by the Federal Drugs Administration and go on to change the world in the 1960s.
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