This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about surprising people whose deaths have not been reported in the era in 1851.
Katherine Dexter McCormick was born into a life of wealth that has deteriorated through marriage, but may have simply enjoyed many of the benefits that flowed in her way. Instead, she placed her considerable fortune, in line with her considerable intentionality, to make the woman's life better.
Activist, philanthropist and benefactor McCormick strategically used her wealth. Most notably, he undertook basic research that led to the development of contraceptives in the late 1950s.
Previously, contraception in the US was very limited, with diaphragm and condoms being banned. The advent of pills made it easier for women to plan when and whether they have children, and promoted the explosive sexual revolution of the 1960s. Today, the pill is the most widely used form of reversible birth control in the United States despite several side effects.
McCormick's interest in birth control began in the 1910s when she learned of Margaret Sanger, a feminist leader who was imprisoned for opening the country's first birth control clinic. She shared Sanger's passionate belief that women should be able to diagram their biological fate.
The two met in 1917 and soon hatched an elaborate scheme for smuggling diaphragms into the United States.
Diaphragm was prohibited under the Comstock Act of 1873, resulting in a federal crime of mailing or delivering “indecent, indecent or crude” material, including pornography, birth control, and items used for abortion. (The law still prohibits mailing items related to abortions has attracted new attention since the federal rights were overturned in 2022.)
Fluent in French and German, McCormick traveled to Europe, where the diaphragm was commonly used. She studied biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was able to possibly possibly in a meeting with the diaphragm maker. According to a 2011 article in MIT Technology Review, “She bought hundreds of devices, hired local tailors and sewed them onto dresses, evening dresses and coats.” “Then she wrapped her clothes around and stuffed them neatly into the trunk for shipping.”
She and her steamer trunks passed through customs. If authorities had stopped her, they would have said, “Only the slightly fluffy dress that owns the boss's socialite would exude such self-importance, grandly restrain Porter and doubt nothing.”
From 1922 to 1925, McCormick smuggled over 1,000 diaphragms into Sanger's clinic.
After her husband passed away in 1947, she took over a significant amount of money, and she asked Sanger for advice on how to put it to use birth control advances. In 1953, Sanger introduced Gregory Goodwin Pinkus and Min Chew Chan, a researcher in Worcester experimental biology in Massachusetts.
She was excited by their work and provided what she needed to provide almost all of the funding (about $23 million today). She even moved to Worcester to monitor and encourage their research. Pincus' wife Elizabeth explained that McCormick was a warrior.
The Food and Drug Administration approved a drug for contraception in 1960.
Katherine Moore Dexter was born on August 27, 1875 in Dexter, west of Detroit, to a wealthy family of social activists. The town is named after his grandfather, Samuel W. Dexter. Samuel W. Dexter founded it in 1824, maintaining an underground railway stop in the home where Catherine was born. Her great grandfather, Samuel Dexter, was the Secretary of Treasury under President John Adams.
Catherine and her 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 powerful lawyer who served as president of the Chicago Bar Association and director of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroads. He also led the Relief Committee and was a major real estate developer after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.
He passed away when Catherine was 14 years old. A few years later, her brother died of meningitis while attending Harvard Law School. Those early deaths directed her into a medical career.
She attended MIT and majored in biology. A rare achievement for women of that era. She arrives with her own heart and successfully completes the rule that female students must always wear hats, claiming that they always pose a fire risk at the Institute of Science. She graduated in 1904 and was scheduled to attend medical school.
But by then she had begun dating the dashing Stanley Robert McCormick, whom she knew in Chicago. She knew in Chicago. As a young lawyer, he helped negotiate the merger that made the family the main owner of the international harvester. By 1909 it was America's fourth largest industrial company and was measured by assets.
McCormick persuades Katherine to marry him instead of going to medical school. They married at their Swiss mother Chateau and settled in Brookline, Massachusetts.
However, even before they got married, he showed signs of mental instability, so he began to experience violent and delusional delusions. He was later admitted to hospital for being deemed schizophrenia and remained under psychiatric care at Rivenlock, the McCormick family home in Montecito, California, until his death. She never divorced him and never remarried. They had no children.
Katherine McCormick spent decades in personal, medical and legal disputes with her husband's siblings. They fought on his treatment, his guardianship and ultimately his property, as detailed in a 2007 article in Prologue Magazine, a publication of the National Archives. She is his sole beneficiary, inheriting about $40 million ($563 million in today's dollars). She combined with the $10 million inherited from her mother (more than $222 million today) made her one of America's wealthiest women.
As her husband's illness consumed her personal life, McCormick threw herself into social causes. She contributed financially to the suffrage movement, gave speeches and demonstrated leadership, becoming treasurer and vice president of the National Women's Election Association. After women gained the right to vote in 1920, the association evolved into a federation of women's voters. McCormick has become vice president.
In 1927 she founded the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School. She provided funding for 20 years, gaining expertise in endocrinology, and later conveyed her interest in the development of oral contraceptives.
After the FDA approved the pill, McCormick turned his attention to funding the first on-campus residence for women at MIT when he studied there. The women did not have a home. “If we can properly accommodate them, the best science education in our country will be open forever,” she said.
Named after her husband, McCormick Hall opened in 1963 on the Institute's Cambridge campus. At the time, women accounted for about 3% of the school's undergraduate students. Today they make up about 50%.
By the time she died of a stroke at her home in Boston on December 28, 1967, McCormick had played a major role in expanding opportunities for women in the 20th century. She was 92 years old.
Apart from the short Boston Globe article, she barely noticed her death. The later obituaries of birth control researchers she supported did not mention her role in their achievements.
At her will, she left $5 million in the planned Parent-Child Relations Federation (more than $46 million today) and $1 million in the Pincus Institute (more than $9 million today). Previously, she had donated Swiss successive property to the US government for use by diplomatic missions in Geneva. She left most of the rest of her property
