On This Day in Herstory, August 27th 1875, Katharine Dexter McCormick, an influential philanthropist, biologist, suffragist, heiress, and funder of the first birth control pill was born, in Dexter, Michigan.
McCormick attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and graduated with a degree in biology in 1904. This is where she really found her passion for gender equality; MIT mandated that all female undergraduates wear hats adorned with feathers, McCormick refused stating that it would be a tremendous fire hazard in laboratories; her passion and relentlessness made MIT’s administration change their policies.
After her graduation McCormick became involved with the Woman’s Suffrage Movement. In 1909 she spoke at the first outdoor rally for suffrage in Massachusetts, and became vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Through her activism McCormick met Margaret Sanger in 1917. Sanger is the mother of modern birth control, and she persuaded McCormick to join the Committee of 100, a group of influential women who worked to legalize birth control.
McCormick and Sanger worked together through the 20′s on birth control issues, McCormick smuggled in and distributed more than 1,000 diaphragms from Europe to New York City. By 1947 McCormick’s mother and husband had died, leaving her inheritor to more than $45 million (more than $500 million today). She used this money to fund the work of Gregory Goodwin Pincus who was working to develop hormonal birth control. She gave him $100,000-$180,000 a year of her own money from 1951 to 1967; the FDA approved the sale of the drug in 1957, but McCormick continued to invest in Pincus as he researched ways to improve birth control.
At the age of 92 McCormick died. In her will she gave $5 million to Stanford University School of Medicine to support the education of female physicians. She also gave $5 million to Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
