She used her wealth strategically to expand opportunities for women, underwriting the development of the pill and supporting the suffrage movement.
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Katharine Dexter McCormick, who was born to a life of wealth, which she compounded through marriage, could have sat back and simply enjoyed the many advantages that flowed her way. Instead, she put her considerable fortune — matched by her considerable willfulness — into making life better for women.
An activist, philanthropist and benefactor, McCormick used her wealth strategically, most notably to underwrite the basic research that led to the development of the birth control pill in the late 1950s.
Before then, contraception in the United States was extremely limited, with bans on diaphragms and condoms. The advent of the pill made it easier for women to plan when and whether to have children, and it fueled the explosive sexual revolution of the 1960s. Today, the pill, despite some side effects, is the most widely used form of reversible contraception in the United States.
McCormick’s interest in birth control began in the 1910s, when she learned of Margaret Sanger, the feminist leader who had been jailed for opening the nation’s first birth control clinic. She shared Sanger’s fervent belief that women should be able to chart their own biological destinies.
The two met in 1917 and soon hatched an elaborate scheme to smuggle diaphragms into the United States.