Katherine McCormick
| Katharine Dexter McCormick | |
|---|---|
At 1913 National American Woman Suffrage Association convention (left)
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| Born |
Katharine Dexter August 27, 1875 Dexter, Michigan |
| Died | December 28, 1967 (aged 92) Boston, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | American |
Katharine Dexter McCormick (August 27, 1875 – December 28, 1967) was a U.S. biologist, 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.
Katharine Dexter was born August 27, 1875 in Dexter, Michigan, in her grandparents' mansion, Gordon Hall, and grew up in Chicago where her father, Wirt Dexter, was a prominent lawyer. Following the early death of her father of a heart attack at age 57 when she was 14 years old, she and her mother Josephine moved to Boston in 1890. Four years later, her brother Samuel died of meningitis at age 25. Katharine graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1904, earning a BSc in biology.
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. In September 1905, they moved into a house in Brookline, Massachusetts. The couple did not have any children.
For over a decade, since graduating cum laude from Princeton University in 1895 where he had also been a gifted athlete on the varsity tennis team, Stanley had been showing signs of progressively worsening mental illness. In September 1906, he was hospitalized for over a year at McLean Hospital and was originally diagnosed dementia praecox, an early label for what is now today known as schizophrenia.
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