A Woman to Know: Katharine Dexter McCormick
A woman more strange and powerful than fiction could ever invent. — Loretta McLaughlin
(image via MIT)
People knew Katharine as the second woman to ever graduate from MIT, a leading biologist studying chemical imbalances, a suffragette who worked with the League of Women Voters -- and even as a criminal, locked up for her political protests and for smuggling contraband (diaphragms) to women in need.
But after her husband died in 1947, Katharine had something she'd never had before: money. Lots and lots of money.
Katharine wrote to her friend Margaret Sanger, asking for advice on how to invest her the McCormick family fortune, hopefully putting the millions toward something that would benefit the women's rights cause. Margaret had just the right idea. Two years later, Katharine donated $2 million of her vast inheritance to research something that would change women's lives forever: the birth control pill.
Add to your library list:
Katharine Dexter McCormick: Pioneer for Women's Rights (Armond Fields)
The Birth of the Pill (Jonathan Eig)
Read more:
A Mind of Her Own (MIT Technology Review)
Rich, Famous and Questionably Sane (National Archives)
Katharine Dexter McCormick, Class of 1904 (MIT Libraries)
A woman lost to history, finally found (The Boston Globe)
Katharine Dexter McCormick (National Women's History Museum)
Hear more:
The Money Behind the Pill (Stuff You Missed in History Class)
** Send your own recommendations for women to know! Reply to this newsletter with your lady and she could be featured in an upcoming edition. You can browse the archive here. **