"Since my graduation in 1904 I have wished to express my gratitude to the Institute for its advanced policy of scientific education for women. This policy gave me the opportunity to obtain the scientific training which has been of inestimable value to me throughout my life."

Katharine Dexter McCormick had a profound influence on both MIT and society at large. She gave generously during her lifetime and, having named MIT the sole residual beneficiary of her will, left it over $25,000,000 when she died in 1967 at age 92.

One of Mrs. McCormick's gifts was Stanley McCormick Hall, MIT's first on-campus residence for women, which she named in memory of her husband. The first wing was dedicated in 1963 and the second in 1968. Before the dormitory was built, MIT could offer housing to only about 50 women undergraduates, so most of the women who came to MIT had to be local residents. McCormick Hall provided living space for over 200 students and made it possible at last for women to become full partners in the life of the Institute. Mrs. McCormick's generosity transformed MIT.

Mrs. McCormick also transformed life in this century. Almost single-handedly, this MIT alumna funded what The New York Times called the "most sweeping sociomedical revolution in history. . . [whose] impact on the United States and other nations [is] almost too vast to analyze."

What Mrs. McCormick made possible was the development of "the pill," the first reliable and convenient way for women to avoid pregnancy. Mrs. McCormick had both a sophisticated understanding of biology and a strong conviction that women could only fully control their lives if they could decide whether and when to bear children. She realized the potential of the work being carried out by Gregory Pincus and Min-cheuh Chang at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology and, at a time when they were unable to find support elsewhere, funded both their laboratory research and the extensive field trials that followed.

Her contribution went far beyond the immediate benefits to women. According to The Boston Globe, the pill "provided the first real hope that runaway population could be controlled; stimulated the search for other improved forms of contraception; [and] did much to legitimize the study and understanding of human sexuality. . . ." Although the literature on the history of birth control sometimes mentions Mrs. McCormick's role, few people know the story of this remarkable woman.

Mrs. McCormick came from a distinguished family. Her great-grandfather, Samuel Dexter, was secretary of war under President John Adams and secretary of the treasury under Adams and Jefferson. Samuel W. Dexter, her grandfather, was a co-founder of the University of Michigan; and her father, Wirt Dexter, was a distinguished jurist in Chicago who helped lead the city after the great fire of 1871. Her mother, Josephine Moore Dexter, was a teacher from Springfield, Massachusetts.

Wirt Dexter died when his daughter Katharine was 14. His widow bought a home in Boston's Back Bay and moved her family back to her home state. Their daughter continued her schooling in Boston, Chicago and then in Europe. Looking back, Mrs. McCormick didn't think much of this education, dismissing it once as "French and music." Nevertheless, she developed an early interest in MIT. In a paper titled "My preparation for the M.I.T.," which she submitted for an English class, she says of the Institute, “How much I had heard about it! How admirable it was said to be and how thorough and practical the training it afforded." Her instructor commented: "Correct in form; margins admirable; punctuation careful. You quite misunderstood the subject."

To overcome her inadequate preparation, she attended MIT for three years as a special student. She enrolled as a regular student in the fall of 1899 and completed her degree in biology in 1904, at age 28. Her thesis was titled "Fatigue of the Cardiac Muscles in Reptiles."

That fall, Miss Dexter married Stanley R. McCormick, the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the reaper. Stanley McCormick had graduated with highest honors from Princeton, where he had been a champion tennis player and football star. As comptroller of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, he helped bring about its 1902 merger with other agricultural machinery manufacturers to form International Harvester, a deal that made him and his family extremely wealthy. He and Miss Dexter shared interests in outdoor sports, music and art. Their lives, in 1904, were full of promise.

According to a 1929 article in The New York Post, two years after her marriage Mrs. McCormick "was deprived of her husband's companionship when he was seriously stricken." In 1909, with a physician testifying that Stanley McCormick suffered from catatonia--now considered a form of schizophrenia--, a judge appointed three guardians to manage his affairs--Mrs. McCormick, Stanley's brother Harold, and his sister, Anita McCormick Blaine. Stanley was placed on a family estate in Santa Barbara, "surrounded by every comfort and luxury that his millions could buy." On the advice of his physician, Mrs. McCormick didn't see her husband for almost 20 years; only rarely did his siblings see him.

"Victors can afford to be generous."

Whatever the effect of this tragedy on Mrs. McCormick, she was not about to forego a productive life. By 1909, she was speaking at the open air meetings of the Massachusetts woman's suffrage movement that, in the days before radio and television, were critical for building support. At one of these, the suffragists were forbidden to speak on the beach at Nantasket, so they strode into the water carrying their Votes for Women banner and spoke to the audience from the sea. In 1911, while over a thousand supporters marched in the streets of Boston, Mrs. McCormick addressed state legislators on the suffrage bill at a hearing that a contemporary historian of the suffrage movement described as "unusually successful."

Mrs. McCormick became an important national figure for the suffragists' cause. She served as treasurer and then as first vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and also as an officer of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. In 1916, as the United States faced the prospect of going to war with Germany, Congress selected a group of President Wilson's cabinet members to form the Council of National Defense. A few months later, the Council established the Women's Committee to help coordinate women's efforts. Mrs. McCormick, who chaired the Suffrage Association's War Service Department, was one of the eleven women, most of them prominent suffragists, appointed. The committee's success further strengthened the suffragists' cause. As Secretary of War Newton Baker said in his forward to the Council's final report in 1919, ". . . with no thought of propaganda it made an argument by producing results . . . . the Women's Committee looms large---and yet larger still is the American woman. . . ."

With the 1920 ratification the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, the Suffrage Association reorganized as the League of Women Voters, with Mrs. McCormick its first vice president. In her last speech to the Association, having praised the courage and commitment of the many men who helped its cause, she acknowledged the "tricks, chicanery and misrepresentation" of the men and women who opposed them. "But let us forget them all," she said. "Victors can afford to be generous."

Mrs. McCormick was working during this time with medical researchers to try to find physiological roots of her husband's illness. However, her efforts brought her into conflict with Stanley's other guardians, who felt that their brother's cure lay with psychoanalysis. In 1928, she sued her husband's family for sole guardianship of both Stanley and his estate. With former Secretary of War Baker as her attorney, she argued that the psychoanalyst the McCormicks employed was providing useless and possibly even harmful treatment, and that the costs, including his $120,000 annual fee, were squandering Stanley's fortune.

The case continued for several years, finally ending up in the Illinois Supreme Court (Baker's legal fees came to $500,000), but ultimately Mrs. McCormick did not prevail. Stanley's estate--and Mrs. McCormick's ability to manage her wealth--remained in control of the Cook County, Illinois, Probate Court. A 1931 New York Times article reported that Mrs. McCormick gave about a third of her annual income to Chicago charities, and another large portion to research on mental diseases. All of her charitable activities remained under the court's supervision.

Finally free to pursue her own causes

This changed in 1947 when Stanley died at age 73. As his sole beneficiary, Mrs. McCormick gained full control of an estate estimated to be worth between $35-40 million. She ended up with only a portion of this, however, since she had to pay more than 85 percent in inheritance taxes. Still, Mrs. McCormick was now a very wealthy woman, finally free to pursue her own concerns.

Mrs. McCormick first met Margaret Sanger in 1917, when the great birth control crusader was in Boston raising money for a student who had been sentenced to jail for distributing Emma Goldman's essay, "Why and How the Poor Should Not Have Many Children." Mrs. McCormick was interested in Sanger's work supporting contraceptive research, and several times she wrote Sanger expressing her frustration at not being able to do more. Finally, in 1950, with Stanley's estate settled, she wrote Sanger asking how she could help. Sanger introduced Mrs. McCormick to Gregory Pincus. Gregory Pincus had done pioneering research on the mechanisms of fertilization and ovum growth in mammals. Once his work led him into hormones, he began to experiment with the use of progesterone to prevent ovulation in rabbits. He understood the potential of his investigations; but drug company that supported him, complaining that his work had yet to turn a profit, refused to fund him further.

Mrs. McCormick, however, was impressed. At first, she contributed through the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, but she soon grew frustrated with its lack of commitment. "It appears to me," she wrote to Sanger, "that no one there . . . is really concerned over achieving an oral contraceptive and that I was mistaken originally in thinking they were." She began supporting Pincus and his lab herself. The successful use of synthetic steroids was announced in 1956, and the federal Food and Drug Administration licensed the first contraceptive pill in 1960.

"The best scientific education . . . will be open to them permanently"

Mrs. McCormick stayed involved with Pincus's lab even after the pill was approved and put on the market, funding research on its long-term effects and efforts to improve it, and providing housing for Pincus's researchers. But now Mrs. McCormick could turn her attention to another concern--a woman's dormitory at MIT. She wrote Sanger in 1960 that this been her ambition for many years, but it had to wait until she achieved her goal of an oral contraceptive. Mrs. McCormick had always been proud--and grateful--that the Institute, unlike many other New England colleges, had never excluded women. Still, she realized with only minimal housing space, the place of women at MIT was not secure. In 1960, she wrote to Dorothy Weeks, a physicist and mathematician who earned a master's and doctorate from MIT in 1923 and 1930, that she had lived for years "in a cold fear that suddenly--unexpectedly--Tech might exclude women. . . . I believe, if we can get them properly housed,--that the best scientific education in our country will be open to them permanently. . . . Then I can rest in peace." Although, she originally wanted her gift kept anonymous, MIT President Julius Stratton was able to persuade her to make her generosity known.

McCormick Hall had ramifications that went far beyond the lives of men and women at MIT. "Until women could come here in large numbers, many people didn't believe MIT was coed, " says William Hecht '61, executive vice president of the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT. "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."

Mrs. McCormick was committed to improving the condition of humanity and to promoting science and science education to achieve that end. These commitments in part motivated her extraordinary generosity to MIT. --Carla Lane