Katharine McCormick
Katharine Dexter McCormick | |
---|---|
Boston, Massachusetts | |
Nationality | American |
Education | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Katharine Dexter McCormick (August 27, 1875 – December 28, 1967) was a U.S. suffragist, philanthropist and, after her husband's death, heir to a substantial part of the McCormick family fortune. She funded most of the research necessary to develop the first birth control pill.
Early life and education
Katharine Dexter was born on August 27, 1875, in
Marriage to Stanley McCormick
She planned to attend medical school, but instead married Stanley Robert McCormick, the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick and heir to the International Harvester fortune, on September 15, 1904.[1] In September 1905, they moved into a house in Brookline, Massachusetts. The couple did not have any children.
Stanley graduated
In June 1908, Stanley was moved to the McCormicks' Riven Rock estate in Montecito, California, where his schizophrenic older sister, Mary Virginia, had lived from 1898 to 1904 before being placed in a Huntsville, Alabama, sanitarium. While there, he was examined by the prominent German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin and diagnosed with the catatonic form of dementia praecox. In 1909, Stanley was declared legally incompetent and his guardianship divided between Katharine and the McCormick family.[3]
Women's rights activist
Katharine's plea for gender equality was apparent from early on. As an undergraduate at MIT, she confronted administration officials. MIT required that women wear hats (fashionably spruced up with feathers). Katharine refused. She argued that it was a fire hazard for feathered hats to be worn in laboratories.[4] As a result, MIT's administration changed their policies.
In 1909 McCormick spoke at the first outdoor rally for
Throughout the 1920s, McCormick worked with Sanger on birth control issues. McCormick smuggled more than 1,000
In 1927, McCormick hosted a reception of delegates attending the 1927 World Population Conference at her home in Geneva. In that year McCormick also turned to the science of endocrinology to aid her husband, believing that a defective adrenal gland caused his schizophrenia.
Philanthropist
Inspired by her husband's diagnosis, Katharine was determined to find a cure. Believing that Stanley's illness was a defective adrenal gland, and could be treated with hormone treatment, she established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation from 1927 to 1947 at Harvard Medical School, and subsidized the publication of the journal Endocrinology. Originally called the "Stanley R. McCormick Memorial Foundation for Neuro- Endocrine Research Corporation", it was the first U.S institute to launch research on the link between endocrinology and mental illness.[7] She also created a research center for the care of the mentally ill at Worcester State Hospital. Her mother Josephine died on November 16, 1937, at age 91 leaving her an estate of more than 10 million dollars. Stanley died on January 19, 1947, at age 72 leaving an estate of over 35 million dollars to Katharine. She spent five years settling his estate, 85% of which went to pay inheritance taxes.
In 1953 McCormick met
After the successful development and approval of the contraceptive pill, Katharine yielded her attention to the lack of housing for women at MIT.[10] MIT was always coeducational, but because it could provide housing to only some fifty female students, many of the women who attended MIT had to be local residents. However, the place of women at the Institute was far from secure as Katharine Dexter told Dorothy Weeks (a physicist and mathematician who earned her master's and doctorate from MIT) that she had lived "in a cold fear that suddenly—unexpectedly—Tech might exclude women...".
In order to provide female students a permanent place at MIT, she donated the money to found Stanley McCormick Hall, an all female dormitory that would allow MIT to house 200 female students. Katharine's funding made a tremendous impact on the number of women at MIT, increasing the number from 3% to 40%.[11] The ramifications of the hall are best stated by William Hecht '61, executive vice president of the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT when he said, "the visible presence of women at MIT helped open up the science and engineering professions to a large part of the population that before had been excluded. It demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that at MIT men and women are equal."
McCormick was also an avid supporter of the arts, particularly to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art where she was one of the Museum's founding members, vice president and donor of the Stanley McCormick Gallery in 1942. Sharing vice president duties with fellow philanthropist and art collector Wright S. Ludington, McCormick served on the Museum's Buildings Committee and was responsible for the hiring of the renowned Chicago architect, David Adler, to convert the old post office into the art museum.
Death
She died on December 28, 1967, in
Legacy
Katharine McCormick is a character in
McCormick was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1998.[14] She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2000.
There is a dorm named after her husband at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[15][16]
See also
References
- ^ "L'histoire du château" (PDF). Landesmuseen.ch (in French). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-03-06. Retrieved 2013-12-05.
- ^ a b "Katharine McCormick's Crusade (Part 1)". Drvitelli.typepad.com. Archived from the original on 2016-10-07. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
- ^ a b Miriam Kleiman (Summer 2007). "Rich, famous, and questionably sane: when a wealthy heir's family sought help from a hospital for the insane". Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration. 39 (2): 38–47.
- ^ "Katharine Dexter (McCormick), Class of 1904". libraries.mit.edu. Archived from the original on 2019-04-04. Retrieved 2016-03-07.
- ^ "A Mind of Her Own". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2016-03-07.
- ^ a b "Katharine Dexter McCormick: Fierce Feminist and Secret Smuggler". Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona. 26 August 2019. Retrieved 2019-09-01.
- ^ "Rich, Famous, and Questionably Sane". www.archives.gov. Retrieved 2016-03-07.
- ^ a b "Katharine McCormick (1876–1967) | The Embryo Project Encyclopedia". embryo.asu.edu. Retrieved 2016-03-07.
- ^ "Katharine McCormick, biologist & millionaire philanthropist – Amazing Women In History". Amazing Women In History. 23 February 2012. Retrieved 2016-03-07.
- ^ "Katharine Dexter (McCormick), Class of 1904: Exhibits: Institute Archives & Special Collections: MIT". libraries.mit.edu. Archived from the original on 2019-04-04. Retrieved 2016-03-07.
- ^ "McCormick, Katharine Dexter – National Women's Hall of Fame". National Women's Hall of Fame. Retrieved 2016-03-07.
- ^ "Results – Search Objects – eMuseum". collections.sbma.net. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
- ^ "SBMA Art Camps & After-School Classes". Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Retrieved July 20, 2018.
- ^ "McCormick, Katharine Dexter". National Women's Hall of Fame. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
- ^ "McCormick Hall". MIT Student Life. Retrieved 20 February 2020.
- ^ "History of McCormick: A Brief History of Stanley A. McCormick Hall".
McCormick Hall is named after Stanley A. McCormick, the husband of Katherine [sic] Dexter McCormick '04, who was the benefactor of the building. [...] Katharine Dexter McCormick, who is most responsible for the construction of the building, ...
Further reading
- Boston Globe, "Mrs. McCormick Dies Here at 92", December 30, 1967.
- Tuck, S. L. McCormick, Katharine Dexter. American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000.
- Jonathan Eig, The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2014)
- ISBN 0-275-98004-9)
- Richard Noll, "Styles of psychiatric practice, 1906–1925: Clinical evaluations of the same patient by James Jackson Putnam, Adolf Meyer, August Hoch, Emil Kraepelin and Smith Ely Jelliffe," History of Psychiatry, 2004, 10: 145–189.
External links
- Correspondence Archived 2017-02-28 at the Wayback Machine between Margaret Sanger and McCormick
- History of McCormick Hall
- MIT Spectrum article on Katharine Dexter McCormick