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Katharine Dexter McCormick, who was born to a life of wealth, which she compounded through marriage, could have sat back and simply enjoyed the many advantages that flowed her way. Instead, she put her considerable fortune — matched by her considerable willfulness — into making life better for women.
An activist, philanthropist and benefactor, McCormick used her wealth strategically, most notably to underwrite the basic research that led to the development of the birth control pill in the late 1950s.
McCormick’s interest in birth control began in the 1910s, when she learned of Margaret Sanger, the feminist leader who had been jailed for opening the nation’s first birth control clinic. She shared Sanger’s fervent belief that women should be able to chart their own biological destinies.
From 1922 to 1925, McCormick smuggled more than 1,000 diaphragms into Sanger’s clinics.
After her husband died in 1947, she inherited a considerable amount of money, and she asked Sanger for advice on how to put it to use advancing research into contraception. In 1953, Sanger introduced her to Gregory Goodwin Pincus and Min-Chueh Chang, researchers at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Massachusetts, who were trying to develop a safe, reliable oral contraceptive.
She was excited by their work and provided almost all the funding — $2 million (about $23 million today) — required to develop the pill. She even moved to Worcester to monitor and encourage their research. Pincus’s wife, Elizabeth, described McCormick as a warrior: “Little old woman she was not. She was a grenadier.”
The Food and Drug Administration approved the pill for birth control in 1960.
Katharine Moore Dexter was born into an affluent, socially activist family on Aug. 27, 1875, in Dexter, Mich., west of Detroit.
Katharine and her older brother, Samuel T. Dexter, grew up in Chicago. Their mother, Josephine (Moore) Dexter, was a Boston Brahmin who supported women’s rights.
She attended M.I.T. and majored in biology, rare achievements for a woman of that era. She arrived with a mind of her own, and successfully challenged a rule that female students had to wear hats at all times, arguing that they posed a fire hazard in the science labs.
But even before they married, he had showed signs of mental instability, and he began experiencing violent, paranoid delusions. He was hospitalized with what was later determined to be schizophrenia, and remained under psychiatric care — mostly at Riven Rock, the McCormick family estate in Montecito, Calif. — until his death.
Mcormick threw herself into social causes. She contributed financially to the suffrage movement, gave speeches and rose in leadership to become treasurer and vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
In 1927, she established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School, believing that a malfunctioning adrenal gland was responsible for her husband’s schizophrenia.
After the F.D.A. approved the pill, McCormick turned her attention to funding the first on-campus residence for women at M.I.T. When she studied there, women had no housing, one of several factors that discouraged them from applying.
By the time she died of a stroke on Dec. 28, 1967, at her home in Boston, McCormick had played a major role in expanding opportunities for women in the 20th century. She was 92.
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