Katharine McCormick

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Katharine McCormick (left) at the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1913)
Gordon Hall birthplace in Dexter (current photography)
From her mother's possession: Château de Prangins on Lake Geneva (contemporary photography)

Katharine Dexter McCormick (born August 27, 1875 in Dexter , Michigan ; died December 28, 1967 in Boston ) was an upper-class American suffragette and a financial sponsor of the development of the birth control pill .

Life

Katharine Dexter was the daughter of wealthy Chicago attorney Wirt Dexter, a descendant of Samuel Dexter , and was born on the Gordon Hall family estate. After her father's death, she moved to Boston with her mother in 1890 . She studied biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was the second woman to graduate with a B.Sc. was allowed to complete. In the 1960s she had to work to ensure that women’s studies became a matter of course at this elite university, too, and in 1963 she donated the construction and maintenance of a dormitory for women.

She married Stanley Robert McCormick (1874–1947), the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick , founder of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company , in Geneva in 1904 , and they moved to Brookline , Massachusetts, they had no children. Stanley McCormick was diagnosed with dementia praecox in 1906 and was looked after by Katharine until his death in 1947. Also in the hope of being able to help him medically, she financially supported neuroendocrinological research at Harvard Medical School and a journal. The author TC Boyle wrote the novel Riven Rock in 1998 about Stanley McCormick and his mental illness.

In 1962 she left Prangins Castle , which she had inherited from her mother, to the US government when her friend Adlai Stevenson was looking for a seat for the American diplomats based in Geneva . The castle later passed into Swiss ownership and has been the seat of the French-speaking part of the Swiss National Museum since 1998 .

Suffragette

In 1909, McCormick first appeared publicly at a suffragette meeting in Massachusetts. It supported the weekly Woman's Journal of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in which they treasurer was. When women had the right to vote in the USA with the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States , she became Vice President of the League of Women Voters .

contraception

As early as the 1920s she supported the women's rights activist Margaret Sanger , who propagated methods of contraception , although she was socially ostracized and legally prosecuted for it, and smuggled diaphragms from Europe to the USA for her counseling centers .

On the advice of Sanger, from 1953 she supported the research work of the chemists Carl Djerassi and Gregory Pincus for hormonal contraception and the series of tests by John Rock (clinical tests of Noretynodrel , developed in 1952 by Frank B. Colton's pharmaceutical company GD Searle ), she is one of them these to the four people who made decisive progress in the development of the birth control pill. Until the 1960s, research still required McCormick's funds before hormonal contraception developed into a profitable billion-dollar business in the pharmaceutical industry.

literature

  • Armond Fields : Katharine Dexter McCormick: Pioneer for Women's Rights . Praeger, Westport, Conn. 2003 [not used here]
  • Jonathan Eig: The Birth of the Pill: How Four Pioneers Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution . New York: Norton, 2014 [not used here]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Genevieve Wanucha: A Mind of Her Own , at MIT technology review, February 22, 2011
  2. ^ McCormick Hall , website
  3. ↑ Katharine McCormick . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 1962 ( online ).
  4. ^ A b Isabel Berwick: Sex, drugs and birth control . Reviewed in: Financial Times , February 8, 2015, p. 11
personal data
SURNAME McCormick, Katharine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dexter, Katharine (maiden name); McCormick Dexter, Katharine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American suffragette and patron
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Dexter (Michigan)
DATE OF DEATH December 28, 1967
Place of death Boston