Long overshadowed by more famous names, Katharine Dexter McCormick used her fortune and fierce determination to quietly bankroll one of the most revolutionary inventions in women’s history: the birth control pill.
Almost exactly three years ago, I spent an afternoon standing outside McCormick Hall, an all-women’s undergraduate residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
It was a quiet day in May. Term had likely ended for the summer. But as a few students and their friends and families trickled in and out of the building, I politely stopped them with a simple question: “Excuse me, do you know who is—or who was—McCormick?”
It is, of course, jarring to be approached by a stranger asking for anything other than directions or perhaps a spare dollar, so I wasn’t surprised when most people instinctively reacted with apprehension. What did astonish me though, was that of the dozen or so passersby I spoke to that day, no one could tell me who the person was who had given their name to the residence we were standing next to. One or two muttered something about a wealthy donor. Others just shrugged. “I should definitely know,” one young woman awkwardly admitted before asking me to enlighten her. Gladly, I did so.
I’d spent the previous day holed up in MIT’s Distinctive Collections archive, hunched over dozens of notebooks and papers, trying to decipher the neat but almost entirely illegible handwriting of one Katharine Dexter McCormick, a 1904 graduate of MIT—one of the first ever women—and the benefactor of this very building in question that she had named for her late husband.
I’d made the trip to Cambridge because McCormick was the subject of a chapter in the book I was writing on the history of women’s economic empowerment. I’d stumbled upon her name in a footnote of an academic article about a far more prominent figure in women’s history— the birth control activist Margaret Sanger—and was immediately captivated by McCormick’s stranger-than-fiction life, by her grit and by her gumption.
At one point in the late 1940s or early ’50s, McCormick had been one of the richest women in America, but what made her truly remarkable was what she did with that wealth: Defying countless contemporary social norms, mores and medical taboos, she provided almost all of the funding necessary to make oral contraception a reality. McCormick’s fortune, fearlessness and feminism mean that she can lay claim to being the mother of the modern pill. Her name is barely known.
A Smuggler’s Life
In some ways, the seeds of Katharine Dexter McCormick’s passion for birth control advocacy and reproductive rights were planted when she was just a teenager.
Born into an affluent family in 1875 and raised in Chicago, McCormick experienced tragedy early on. Her father died when she was 14. A few years later, her only brother succumbed to meningitis while studying at Harvard. Today, a small plaque commemorates him still.
She grew fascinated by the human body—by how it works and how it can fail—and fought for a place at MIT to study biology at a time when medicine was squarely the domain of men.
She intended to go to medical school after earning her bachelor’s degree, but Stanley Robert McCormick, a phenomenally wealthy lawyer and the heir to an industrial empire, convinced her to marry him. The couple wed at her family’s Swiss chateau, but shortly afterwards Stanley started to display symptoms of serious mental instability. He became delusional and angry, and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, forcing him to remain in the care of medical professionals until his death in Montecito, Calif., in 1947.
McCormick had already endured the loss of two beloved men in her life. Stanley’s death now marked a third crushing blow—but it also represented the beginning of a new chapter. After a lengthy legal dispute with his family, she ended up inheriting around $40 million (about $530 million in today’s money) from her late husband. Coupled with the $10 million her own mother had passed on to her when she died, this rendered McCormick one of the nation’s richest women.
And this spirited widow knew exactly how she wanted to put that money to work.
She’d always been a staunch advocate for women’s rights, initially inspired by her own mother’s suffragist convictions.
In 1917, she met Margaret Sanger who had opened her eyes to the idea that birth control could be a catalyst for women’s rights and therefore personal and economic independence. She’d also dwelled on the idea of what her life might’ve looked like if she’d borne her late husband’s child and if that child, who she would have had to raise alone, had suffered from the same condition as Stanley.
McCormick and Sanger started working together, pondering how contraception might be made reliable and widely available, and what medical advances would have to occur in order for a ‘magic pill’ to become more than just a wonderfully liberating notion.
In the meantime, McCormick temporarily pursued a career as a cross-border smuggler of illicit goods. Strict Comstock laws made it almost impossible at the time for many women in the U.S. to access contraceptive devices like diaphragms that were widely available in Europe. So, McCormick travelled to France and Germany where she used both her medical training and her mastery of language to pose as a medical supplies buyer.
Over the course of several years, she bought hundreds of diaphragms from manufacturers and distributors, had them sewn into the linings of her fancy coats and dressed, smuggled them back into the U.S. undetected, and distributed them in Sanger’s clinics.
Funding a Revolution
In the early 1950s, Sanger introduced McCormick to Gregory Goodwin Pincus and Min-Chueh Chang, two researchers in Massachusetts, who were trying to develop an oral contraceptive. They’d encountered all sorts of hurdles from within the medical community and beyond—accusations that the work they were engaging in was dangerous and unethical, that it was un-Christian or that they were playing god.
To be sure, early human trials that led to the eventual development of the contraceptive pill were, indeed, profoundly inhumane and exploitative, and much of the broader birth control movement was driven by individuals with racist and eugenicist motivations. Some wanted to sterilize those suffering with mental illness, for example. Sanger’s legacy is complex and troubling.
But McCormick was different. Her focus was on finding a way to separate sex and pregnancy so that individuals could make decisions over their own reproductive rights, over their own health and therefore over their own life.
All said, McCormick ended up channeling around $2 million into the coffers of researchers—cash that enabled them to develop the pill, to start selling it in 1957 as a cure for “gynecological disorders,” to eventually get it approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a contraceptive, and then—finally—to safely launch it onto the U.S. market.
In May 1960, a tiny packet of hope, possibility and sweet independence started finding its way into the bathroom cabinets, wash bags and purses of women across the country. It would be years before it could legally be prescribed in every state and regardless of marital status, but this was the dawn of the sexual revolution and of economic independence. This was a tiny taste of freedom.
A Packet Full of Promise
It’s hard to overstate the impact the pill has had on the world. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost all women in the U.S. today will at some point in their lives use birth control and, aside from permanent contraceptive methods like tubal ligation, the pill is the most common type.
As I wrote in that chapter of my book about McCormick and the pill, the simplicity of its common, monosyllabic nickname is testament to the revolutionary effect it has had—not only on individuals but also on communities, countries, cultural standards, and yes, even on entire economies. Plenty of academic research shows that availability of the pill in America has raised women’s college attendance and graduation rates, has increased representation of women in professional occupations, and has bolstered women’s earnings.
In 1993, The Economist named the birth control pill one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. “When the history of the 20th century is written,” the magazine declared, “it may be seen as the first [time] when men and women were truly partners. Wonderful things can come in small packets.”
It’s hard to fathom that despite all of this, The New York Times only this year published its obituary of Katharine Dexter McCormick—as part of a series dedicated to recognizing remarkable people who’ve historically been overlooked.
And it’s also hard to make sense of the fact that—for all of the irrefutable proof that the pill saves lives, improves livelihoods and safeguards civil rights and liberties—access to it is under severe threat today.
Barriers to contraception—indeed, barriers to all reproductive healthcare—are high and rising. That’s especially true for individuals at the intersections of marginalized identities. Once again, the arguments rooted in hard facts are being bulldozed by a political elite that’s been emboldened by a swelling culture of shameless misogyny.
Today, few people have heard of Katharine Dexter McCormick, who died in December 1967 at the age of 92. But as the war on our reproductive rights rages on, and as we nostalgically recall times when progress really did seem unshakeable—the birth of the pill in 1960 or the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, for example—let us be inspired by McCormick’s ingenuity, courage and determination. Let us allow her story to serve as a reminder that every person, even through tragedy and loss, and every penny, be it a dollar or a fortune, has the potential to elicit huge change.
