December 9, 2015 • 31 mins
Katharine McCormick made her mark in two different areas: She was a big part of the movement for women's suffrage in the U.S. And, she was a huge - and for a while, almost entirely forgotten - part of the development of oral contraceptives.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm
Holly Fry. Today we are going to talk about Katherine
Dexter McCormick. She was a graduate of m I T
(00:23):
at a time when the school did not admit many
women at all. She was also a big part of
the movement for women's suffrage in the United States, and
she was a huge and for a while almost entirely
forgotten part of the development of oral contraceptives. So usually
when we do UH biographical episodes, we do a mostly
(00:45):
chronological account of a person's life, but various parts of
Katherine Dexter McCormick's life and her accomplishments overlap each other
a lot, so it makes a little more sense this time.
We're going to spend the first portion of the episode
talking about her personal life for upbringing her education. Then
we will move on to her work toward getting women
the right to vote in the United States, and we
(01:06):
will finish with her nearly single handed funding of the
development of oral contraceptives. So, in addition to the discussion
of contraception, that's going to be part of today's episode,
McCormick's husband had a number of mental health issues, and
the nature of them might not be suitable for our
most young listeners. Katherine Dexter McCormick was born Katherine Moore
(01:32):
Dexter on August eight in Dexter, Michigan. The name of
the town was no coincidence. It had been founded by
her grandfather. Her parents, Wort and Josephine Dexter, actually lived
in Chicago. That Josephine had gone to Dexter to have
the baby and to be looked after by Wort's mother
in Chicago. Work McCormick was a lawyer, and both he
(01:55):
and his father had been abolitionists, and this was an
enterprise that Wort's grandmother there had also participated in by
hiring people who were fleeing north and employing them until
they could be more permanently settled. Katherine's mother was also
a supporter of the suffrage movement and an advocate for
what was at the time referred to as prudent sex,
(02:16):
in other words, contraception, which at this point was both
illegal and socially extremely discouraged. The Dexters were an extremely
affluent and prominent family with branches in Boston, Dexter, Michigan,
and Chicago. They could trace their roots back to Massachusetts
colony all the way to sixteen forty two, and they
(02:36):
worked their way into positions of wealth as well as
local and even national influence essentially everywhere they lived. They
were basically an affluent, very powerful family, and Catherine herself
was a smart, studious, serious child, and she was considered
by the adults around her to be very mature for
her age. These traits cemented themselves in her personality after
(03:00):
the sudden death of her father following a severe heart
attack when she was only fourteen. After her father's death,
Catherine and her mother relocated to Boston, where she was
expected to study art and literature because that was the
customary education path for a young woman in Boston's affluent society.
But when it was time to enroll in secondary school, Catherine,
(03:21):
in part because of her father's death, insisted on studying science. Eventually,
Catherine and her mother compromised, and she was allowed to
go to a finishing school that had a very good
academic reputation. In May of eighteen ninety four, Catherine's older brother, Sam,
who was just starting his own law career died suddenly
(03:41):
and unexpectedly of spinal meningitis. Catherine was just a few
months die of her nineteenth birthday. Katherine's mother was understandably distraught.
Catherine was heartbroken as well, but also angry. Having lost
both her brother and her father, both under the care
of doctors who were power was to help them. It
just made her furious. She became even more determined to
(04:04):
pursue a career as a scientist, although she put that
effort on hold for eighteen months to accompany her bereft
mother in Europe on the trip that Josephine had arranged
to try to escape her grief. Katherine resumed her education
in November of eight when she and her mother returned
to Boston. She first spent a few months studying at
a local college, but she left because she didn't find
(04:27):
their material very new or challenging to her. She started
looking for a better school and considered attending both Harvard
and Radcliffe. She finally decided on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
then known as Boston Tech, and she chose m i
T in spite of warnings that it made it hard
for women's students to study there. As of eighteen ninety six,
(04:48):
when McCormick began pursuing her admission to m I T,
only forty four women were enrolled and only one had
ever graduated from there. Katherine did pass her entrance exam,
but because her education had been in a finishing school,
she was required to take a number of other preparatory
classes before she could start her real degree work, So
(05:09):
even though she had passed the exam, she had to
basically redo the same courses of study for classes that
were considered legitimate. She worked on all of these classes
from eighteen ninety six until eighteen ninety nine, and then
finally enrolled as a regular student at the age of five.
She graduated with a bachelor's degree in biology in nineteen
(05:31):
o four. As one example of her life at m
I T, the school's policies of the day required ladies
to wear hats. McCormick refused, citing the fact that the
feathers that were fashionable in ladies hats were in fact
a fire hazard when they were worn in the lab.
She finally got the chemistry department to repeal that rule,
not just for her, but for all female students. Catherine's
(05:55):
original plan after graduation had been to study to become
a surgeon. However, just before the start of her senior year,
she became reacquainted with Stanley McCormick. The Dexters and the
McCormick's had connections that went back for decades. Stanley's father,
Cyrus McCormick, owned International Harvester Company, which had been founded
(06:16):
by his father, the inventor of the mechanical harvester. When
Stanley's father's factory was severely damaged in the Great Chicago Fire,
it was Catherine's father, who was at the helm of
a relief program to rebuild the city, who convinced him
not to move his business elsewhere. Katherine and Stanley had
first met at a ball in eighteen eighty nine, when
(06:38):
Catherine was just thirteen and Stanley was fourteen. Then sixteen
years later, on September first, nineteen o three, they were
both coincidentally at a resort outside of Boston known as
Beverly Farms. Stanley immediately picked up their friendship as though
they had never been apart. Even though Catherine actually found
this a little odd and off putting, it was awfully familiar.
(07:00):
Even behavior expectations at this time. Also a little familiar
was that within a month Stanley had proposed to her. Catherine, however,
was afraid that her ambition to become a surgeon would
be impossible as if she got married. Nonetheless, she eventually accepted,
then she broke it off, and she accepted again, then
(07:20):
she broke it off again. She wound up ending their
engagement three times before they eventually got married. Stanley, for
his part, was passionate and persistent, even going so far
as to go to Geneva uninvited after Catherine had called
off one of their engagements in an effort to try
to win her back. Aside from this, Ardor, Catherine found
(07:41):
some of his behavior troubling and erratic. For example, he
became obsessed about the fact that he had masturbated, and
he was terrified that this had somehow ruined his potential
to be a husband. But in spite of all of that,
the pair finally married on September fifteenth of nineteen o four. Yeah,
there were there were clearly a lot of different factors
(08:03):
going into Catherine's perpetual ending of their engagements and her
eluctance to get married to him, But she does seem
to have genuinely loved him, and in his more stable moments,
found him to be a nice, delightful person to be around. However,
after their marriage, it became clear almost immediately that Stanley
was really not in good mental health. The McCormick family
(08:26):
was also reported to just be extremely dysfunctional. Stanley's father
was described as a tyrant and his mother as a
religious zealot. His older sister was in full time care
due to her own mental illness, and biographers have described
his other siblings as sociopaths. Catherine hoped that removing Stanley
(08:47):
from Chicago and from his family's influence and all of
the pressures of their unhealthy family dynamics would help him recover. Instead,
just two years into their marriage, his condition deteriorated to
the point that he had to be hospitalized. He was
admitted to McLean Hospital for the Insane, and he was
diagnosed with dementia pray Cox of the catatonic type schizophrenia
(09:10):
basically at the age of thirty two. He was later
moved to Riven Rock, which is an estate in California
that had actually been purchased for the care of his
older sister, who had since been moved to a sanitarium.
That one description he had a family that had bought
an estate to provide care for his mentally ill older
(09:31):
sister sort of encapsulates a lot of stuff about the
McCormick family. Catherine's efforts to take care of Stanley would
be a huge part of the rest most of the
rest of her life, and it was also a source
of strain between her and his family. She and the
mccormicks had major differences of opinion and how he should
(09:55):
be cared for and treated. This battle was huge and ugly,
and sometimes it was dreamely public, to the point that
it took all of them to court on more than
one occasion, and was frequently covered as a scandal in
the newspapers. Compounding the situation was that Stanley's behavior toward
women in particular was so alarming and inappropriate that he
(10:17):
can actually only be cared for by male doctors and nurses.
For about twenty years, Catherine generally only saw her husband
from afar from some vantage point where he could not
see her. However, even as doctors and his family suggested,
repeating it repeatedly, that she divorced him or get an annulment,
Catherine refused to give up her role in Stanley's life
(10:40):
and care. One reason was that she really believed his
family were part of the problem and that they did
not have his best interests at heart when making decisions
on his behalf. But she had also been powerless to
stop the study the sudden deaths of her father and
her brother, and so that was probably also part of
what drove her who continued to be married to Stanley
(11:02):
and to try to find the best care for him.
We're not going to talk about the details here, but
Stanley's care in the dispute surrounding it were ongoing for
more than forty years. Gaps in Catherine's advocacy work were
often due to some kind of crisis with Stanley or
his family or his team of doctors. It was basically
(11:22):
an underlying layer of Katherine's life right up until Stanley's death.
After a brief word from one of our great sponsors,
we are going to talk about Katherine Dexter McCormick's role
in the suffrage movement. Katherine Dexter McCormick's first involvement in
the movement for women's suffrage was while she was still
in college. She joined the College Equal Suffrage League, which
(11:43):
had been formed by students from Radcliffe, Wellesley and Boston College.
McCormick was the first m I T student to join.
Through the nineteen teens, she was also active in the
Massachusetts Woman's Suffrage Alliance, where she toured cities and towns
in Massachusetts to race support for women's right to vote.
This included at one point speaking from the water in
(12:04):
Boston Harbor when police refused to allow the crowd to
congregate on the beach. She was also a big part
of keeping the Massachusetts branch of the National American Women's
Suffrage Association, or in a w s A financially a float,
as that organization got bigger and had some trouble making
its ends meet, in part because not all of the
(12:24):
new members paid their their dues on time. McCormick's work
in record keeping and sometimes having the awkward conversations getting
people to pay their delinquent dues got the organization back
on track. She eventually became treasurer of the organization and
a member of its board. Carrie Chapman Cat, who helped
(12:45):
found the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance, recruited McCormick to join
that organization as well. She'd heard McCormick speak and thought
her speaking and writing abilities, plus her fluency in multiple languages,
would make her a good choice to become the organizations
corresponding secretary. McCormick was eventually elected to that position. In
(13:05):
addition to doing extensive work speaking, writing, traveling, and working
within these organizations, McCormick also made a number of financial
contributions to the suffrage movement, including bailing out one of
the one organization's magazine that had fallen into debt. In
contrast to recent podcast subject Saffia Duleep Singh, whose support
(13:27):
of increasingly radical arms of the suffrage movement in Britain
was unwavering, McCormick was not in favor of more radical
or militant demonstrations. For example, after being asked for a
donation to the suffrage movement, Helen McGill White, who was
the first woman in the United States to earn a PhD,
wrote a letter to The New York Times decrying the
more militant suffragettes in Britain. White's letter ran into the
(13:50):
headline upbraids suffragists since they can done outrages. Mrs White
refuses Cash. McCormick, writing in her capacity as treasure or
of the n a w s A, responded in a
letter published under the headline on Militant Women, Treasurer of
National Suffrage Body says it is dumb. I just want
(14:11):
to take a moment to point out neither of these
women wrote these headlines right. Editors at the New York
Times did uh. In her letter, McCormick said, quote, whatever
may be the opinions held by our members, the fact
remains that the National Association is not a militant suffrage association,
that there is no militant suffrage association among our many branches. Moreover,
(14:36):
the work we are doing will bear any scrutiny which
may be directed upon it from those holding Mrs White's
point of view. These opinions held by the n a
w s a S members are an oblique reference to
Alice Paul. These letters came out about a month after
Paul's thirteen Women's suffrage parade in Washington, d C. Which
(14:57):
led to a confrontation with police. Along with many of
the naw SAYS younger members, Paul was willing to take
more aggressive steps to try to get more immediate results
for women's rights. Paul eventually split off from the naw
s A and formed her own organization, the Congressional Union,
in nineteen fourteen, taking the naw says more militant members
(15:20):
with her. The schism between the two organizations widened, with
Paul wanting more militant actions for more immediate change, while
the naw SA was willing to work more gradually and
less confrontationally, and with mccormicks supporting the naw says prevailing opinion.
That same year, McCormick was elected first Vice president of
(15:41):
the naw s A, where one of the tasks before
her was to revitalize the organization following the loss of
Paul and some of its members. She organized fundraising, She
fin tuned their logistics, She tried to truly separate their
aims from the Congressional Unions, and she put together plans
to lobby and stay that had not yet passed suffrage
(16:02):
bills for women d NAWSA and the rest of the
movement saw the results of their efforts in women gaining
the right to vote in an increasing number of states,
culminating in the Nineteenth Amendment, which was ratified in nineteen
twenty After another brief sponsor break, we will talk about
McCormick's work in the world of contraception. Once the nineteenth
(16:23):
Amendment had been ratified, Katherine Dexter McCormick continued to be
involved with women's voting rights through the League of Women Voters,
including serving as its vice president, But once women had
the right to vote, she had the time and energy
to focus on other matters, and one of those was contraception.
McCormick had several reasons for being interested in contraception, as
(16:45):
we noted at the top of the show quote prudent
sex was something that her mother had supported. At the time,
Schizophrenia was believed to be an inherited condition, with children
of schizophrenic parents certain to develop schizophrenia themselves. So even
of McCormick was not having a physical relationship with her husband,
she could easily see the importance of couples preventing pregnancy
(17:07):
for health reasons. But it was not just about medical necessity.
McCormick genuinely felt that women needed to be able to
control their own bodies and decide for themselves when or
whether to get pregnant. There could not possibly be equality
between the sexes in her mind, as long as women's
bodies and lives could be derailed by unplanned pregnancies and
(17:30):
unplanned children. McCormick meant birth control activist Margaret Sanger in
Boston in nineteen seventeen at a trial of a man
who had been arrested for distributing Sanger's pamphlets on birth control.
At the time, these pamphlets and other information about contraception
were considered to be obscenity under the Comstock Act, a
(17:51):
very broad federal statute that outlawed obscene literature. Information about
abortion and contraception were classified as obscene under the law.
After meeting Sanger, and at her request, mccormicks started smuggling
diaphragms back from her trips to Europe. Diaphragms were illegal
in the United States, but they were legal in parts
(18:12):
of Europe, and unlike condoms, they were a form of
contraception that women could control for themselves. McCormick would take
advantage of her family's chateau outside of Geneva, her fluency
in several languages, and her money to do this. She
would go to Europe, travel and pose as a scientist,
drawing on her knowledge of biology acquired at m I T.
(18:35):
She would buy up huge numbers of diaphragms and then
have them sewn into the linings and pockets of garments
so that she could smuggle them back into the United States.
She did this with more than one thousand diaphragms, and
although the records are unclear, most of this was probably
funded with her own money. Through the nineteen twenties, McCormick
(18:55):
was involved in birth control advocacy, going to meetings and
conferences and using her knowledge of biology to study reproduction.
She also dedicated some of her mental and financial resources
to endocrine research, having become convinced that her husband's mental
health issues were really due to a malfunctioning endocrine system.
She actually established the neuro Indocrine Research Foundation at Harvard
(19:17):
Medical School in n seven, and she funded other research
into the endocrine system as well, and as sort of
a side note, she established a hospital for the mentally
ill at Worcester State Hospital. Through the nineteen thirties, attitudes
in the United States were very gradually warmed toward the
idea of legal contraception, although the Catholic Church lobbied hard
(19:38):
against it. Some states began to repeal their obscenity laws
or pass specific exemptions for birth control literature. In nineteen
thirty seven, the American Medical Association reversed an earlier decision
and came out in support of artificial contraception under a
doctor's supervision and as part of a marriage. In ninety eight,
(19:59):
Margaret s Her announced that she was forming a Citizens
Committee for Planned Parenthood, which would later become the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America. She continued her birth control advocacy,
and McCormick was was vocal in her support of it
as well, even as it drew criticism from the press,
her mother, and Stanley's family. But in seven, Stanley McCormick,
(20:22):
by then one of the only two surviving McCormick siblings, died.
A handwritten will dated the day of their wedding was
found in Stanley's safe deposit box, giving his whole estate
to his wife. Lawyers told Stanley's remaining sister that this
will could not be contested, and Catherine Dexter McCormick inherited
the entire McCormick estate. It took her five years to
(20:45):
settle the whole estate, pay all the taxes, divest herself
of the harvester business and all of Stanley's property, But
once all of that was done, she basically turned her
sole focus to contraception. At this point, although popular support
for birth control was increasing, funding to create a reliable
contraceptive was almost non existent. On June eighth three, McCormick
(21:11):
and Sanger met with Dr Gregory Pinkis at the Worcester
Foundation for Experimental Biology in Worcester, Massachusetts. He'd been researching
hormones effects on contraception and saying or believed he could
develop an effective contraceptive. McCormick wrote him a check. Is
a little unclear exactly how many dollars she eventually gave him,
(21:31):
but she basically wound up uh funding all of the
work of Dr Pinkas, which was carried out in conjunction
with Dr minshit Chang and other doctors and researchers, almost
single handedly. Sometimes she funneled these funds through Planned Parenthood
for tax reasons, and she also kept an extremely careful
eye on the project, carefully reviewing their progress, very persistently,
(21:54):
coaxing and sometimes prodding it along. She was five years
old and she was adamant that she see a working
version of the pill in her lifetime. Pinkas and team
eventually started testing their combined oral contraceptive pill on human subjects,
and to be clear, some of the testing and development
(22:15):
methods used do not meet today's ethical standards. For example,
some were conducted on patients at an asylum. Others were
conducted out of existing birth control clinics in Puerto Rico,
but the women enrolled in the trial were often desperate
to prevent pregnancy and not necessarily made aware of the
drug's risks. Although this didn't run a foul of ethical
(22:36):
standards at the time, it absolutely would be unethical today. However,
in spite of their ethical problems, these trials proved that
the drug that Pinkas was developing worked. You could also
make this name general point about basically this entire podcast.
The suffrage movement that McCormick was part of largely excluded
black women and other minorities, and Margaret Sanger had ties
(22:57):
to the eugenics movement, which was really popular in the
twenties and thirties. So basically all of the things we
were talking about today, including various things that were tried
in Stanley's mental health care, had issues that were somewhere
between between troubling and abhorrent. A century later, in nineteen
fifty seven, enovid, which combined synthetic estrogen with synthetic progestine,
(23:22):
was approved for use in regulating menstrual cycles. Of course,
in regulating the cycle, it was also preventing ovulation. The
FDA approved its use for this purpose as the first
oral contraceptive in nineteen sixty. With that out of the way,
McCormick turned her focus to the fact that m I
T did not have adequate housing for female students. In
(23:43):
nineteen sixty eight, Women's Residents Stanley McCormick Hall opened its doors.
It was m i t s first residence halls exclusively
for women, and it quadrupled the number of women's students
the m I T could house, bringing the number up
to two hundred. The dormitory's dedication took place three months
after mc cormis death at the age of two. She
died on December ninety seven of a stroke. Her financial
(24:06):
contributions to the creation of the pill were even then
largely forgotten. Her death was not even reported as news. However,
in her will, she gave sizeable donations to the Planned
Parenthood Federation and to Stanford University to assist women who
wanted to get a medical degree. She also made contributions
posthumously to numerous civic organizations, as well as several that
(24:29):
were devoted to art and music. She did really all
of this in Stanley's honor. She also established the Katherine
Dexter McCormick Library to be housed at the Planned Parenthood
Federation offices in New York. And that is Katherine Dexter McCormick.
That's another one of those people, and it comes up
often in this podcast or I hear their life story
and think I'm the laziest person alive, like so much work.
(24:53):
You and I have joked off off Mike about how
this episode on Katherine Dexter McCormick and one that is
going to run around the same time. You may all
have heard it already about the Declaration of Sentiments. Both
could have been two parters because they're so involved, But
then we would have had three two parters in a
month that we're all about suffrage, which we love this topic,
(25:17):
but our listeners like variety, which is why why we
we did not do it that way. However, the book
that I got about Katherine Dexter McCormick is enormous. It's
it's like, how long is it. I'm gonna pick it
up on Mike here and flip through it. Uh, Okay,
it's only three pages long, but it seems enormous. It's
(25:42):
got a whole It's got so much more information in
it about UM, about Stanley's mental health care, about various
friendships and relationships that she developed with other women in
the suffrage movement, like just the so much other stuff
that we did not get into you. Um, she's pretty amazing.
That book is called Catherine Dexter McCormick, Pioneer for Women's Rights. Um.
(26:04):
And Oh, the thing that I was working around to
you is that one of the things that is funny
to me about having done this episode and the one
that is coming out either already or soon about the
the Declaration of Sentiments and the Seneca Falls Convention, is, Uh,
(26:25):
I wonder how those women's lives may have been different
had they had access to contraception, because so many of
them had seven or eight children, and more than likely
they had seven or eight children because they had no
choice about methods of not having children. That were actually
reliable and effective. So anyway, uh, that's Katherine Dexter McCormick.
(26:52):
I also have listener mail. I have blister mail is
not about Katherine Dexter McCormick. It is about moonshine. It
is from Jack's sax says Dear Tracy and Holly. I'm
a proud alum of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, So
your episode on moonshine reminded me of a cultural reference.
(27:12):
If your listeners live in the South and or watch
SEC sports, they are probably aware of the unofficial U
t K fight song Rocky Top. However, the band only
plays the chorus at games, and the verses are full
of strange mountain culture. In the second verse, there is
a direct reference to federal agents looking for stills you
touched on the legal moonshine business, which I personally watched
(27:33):
explode while working in two different local liquor liquor stores.
Popcorn Sutton was a long time producer of moonshine, and
after his death, his recipe is now being used for
legal corn whiskey. It has caused a lot of debate
on the area's cultural history and what is appropriate representation.
I could go on for a while about the idea
of quote poor stupid Southerners as a stereotype, but y'all
(27:56):
have addressed this, and thank you. I will say that
a lot of people still get their shine from some
local producer and guard their sources jealously. Personally, the best
I've ever had was produced in a very urban area
of Knoxville by a passionate advocate of the community and
mountain heritage, and one of his best flavors was Rosemary
your figure, and and then he sends a little note
(28:17):
that's less related about things that he does while listening.
Thank you, Jacks. One of the reasons that I wanted
to read this email is that I actually wanted to
talk about Popcorn Sutton in that episode. Um. He was
a character. Uh. It was very well known, like in
(28:38):
the Maggie Valley area of North Carolina and parts of
North Carolina and Tennessee. And there are lots of videos
of him and documentaries of him about his moonshining. And
one of the reasons that we didn't I didn't end
up putting him in the and the final outline was
that it's a very sad story. He he uh, was
(29:01):
he had a he had a raid. There was a
federal raid on his operation, and he had already been
on house arrest, and he was sentenced to prison, um,
and he wound up taking his own life rather than
returning to prison. And it was just such a huge
story with so many layers to it that I could
not find a good place to put it in the
already long story of Moonshine that we had. In that.
(29:22):
The other thing was, I went looking around for a
video of him to share on our social media after
that episode came out, because I had kind of wanted
to tell a little bit of his story, but I
couldn't find a place for it, and I could not
find any in which he was not cussing a blue streak,
because that is how he talked. M And the one
(29:43):
that I did find is a very lovely photo essay
which has a picture of his tombstone on it, which
has what many people consider to be the mother of
all swear words on it, so like even then, even
on his tombstone, he had a very a very foul
mouth full of foul language. Um. But anyway, he's a
(30:05):
very interesting character and his his story has a lot
of parallels to the overall story of Moonshine in that
part of the the Avalacha Mountains. So uh, thank you
again Jack for writing. If you would like to write
to us, we are at History Podcast at how stuff
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and History. Are tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler
(30:27):
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(31:14):
m
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm
Holly Fry. Today we are going to talk about Katherine
Dexter McCormick. She was a graduate of m I T
(00:23):
at a time when the school did not admit many
women at all. She was also a big part of
the movement for women's suffrage in the United States, and
she was a huge and for a while almost entirely
forgotten part of the development of oral contraceptives. So usually
when we do UH biographical episodes, we do a mostly
(00:45):
chronological account of a person's life, but various parts of
Katherine Dexter McCormick's life and her accomplishments overlap each other
a lot, so it makes a little more sense this time.
We're going to spend the first portion of the episode
talking about her personal life for upbringing her education. Then
we will move on to her work toward getting women
the right to vote in the United States, and we
(01:06):
will finish with her nearly single handed funding of the
development of oral contraceptives. So, in addition to the discussion
of contraception, that's going to be part of today's episode,
McCormick's husband had a number of mental health issues, and
the nature of them might not be suitable for our
most young listeners. Katherine Dexter McCormick was born Katherine Moore
(01:32):
Dexter on August eight in Dexter, Michigan. The name of
the town was no coincidence. It had been founded by
her grandfather. Her parents, Wort and Josephine Dexter, actually lived
in Chicago. That Josephine had gone to Dexter to have
the baby and to be looked after by Wort's mother
in Chicago. Work McCormick was a lawyer, and both he
(01:55):
and his father had been abolitionists, and this was an
enterprise that Wort's grandmother there had also participated in by
hiring people who were fleeing north and employing them until
they could be more permanently settled. Katherine's mother was also
a supporter of the suffrage movement and an advocate for
what was at the time referred to as prudent sex,
(02:16):
in other words, contraception, which at this point was both
illegal and socially extremely discouraged. The Dexters were an extremely
affluent and prominent family with branches in Boston, Dexter, Michigan,
and Chicago. They could trace their roots back to Massachusetts
colony all the way to sixteen forty two, and they
(02:36):
worked their way into positions of wealth as well as
local and even national influence essentially everywhere they lived. They
were basically an affluent, very powerful family, and Catherine herself
was a smart, studious, serious child, and she was considered
by the adults around her to be very mature for
her age. These traits cemented themselves in her personality after
(03:00):
the sudden death of her father following a severe heart
attack when she was only fourteen. After her father's death,
Catherine and her mother relocated to Boston, where she was
expected to study art and literature because that was the
customary education path for a young woman in Boston's affluent society.
But when it was time to enroll in secondary school, Catherine,
(03:21):
in part because of her father's death, insisted on studying science. Eventually,
Catherine and her mother compromised, and she was allowed to
go to a finishing school that had a very good
academic reputation. In May of eighteen ninety four, Catherine's older brother, Sam,
who was just starting his own law career died suddenly
(03:41):
and unexpectedly of spinal meningitis. Catherine was just a few
months die of her nineteenth birthday. Katherine's mother was understandably distraught.
Catherine was heartbroken as well, but also angry. Having lost
both her brother and her father, both under the care
of doctors who were power was to help them. It
just made her furious. She became even more determined to
(04:04):
pursue a career as a scientist, although she put that
effort on hold for eighteen months to accompany her bereft
mother in Europe on the trip that Josephine had arranged
to try to escape her grief. Katherine resumed her education
in November of eight when she and her mother returned
to Boston. She first spent a few months studying at
a local college, but she left because she didn't find
(04:27):
their material very new or challenging to her. She started
looking for a better school and considered attending both Harvard
and Radcliffe. She finally decided on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
then known as Boston Tech, and she chose m i
T in spite of warnings that it made it hard
for women's students to study there. As of eighteen ninety six,
(04:48):
when McCormick began pursuing her admission to m I T,
only forty four women were enrolled and only one had
ever graduated from there. Katherine did pass her entrance exam,
but because her education had been in a finishing school,
she was required to take a number of other preparatory
classes before she could start her real degree work, So
(05:09):
even though she had passed the exam, she had to
basically redo the same courses of study for classes that
were considered legitimate. She worked on all of these classes
from eighteen ninety six until eighteen ninety nine, and then
finally enrolled as a regular student at the age of five.
She graduated with a bachelor's degree in biology in nineteen
(05:31):
o four. As one example of her life at m
I T, the school's policies of the day required ladies
to wear hats. McCormick refused, citing the fact that the
feathers that were fashionable in ladies hats were in fact
a fire hazard when they were worn in the lab.
She finally got the chemistry department to repeal that rule,
not just for her, but for all female students. Catherine's
(05:55):
original plan after graduation had been to study to become
a surgeon. However, just before the start of her senior year,
she became reacquainted with Stanley McCormick. The Dexters and the
McCormick's had connections that went back for decades. Stanley's father,
Cyrus McCormick, owned International Harvester Company, which had been founded
(06:16):
by his father, the inventor of the mechanical harvester. When
Stanley's father's factory was severely damaged in the Great Chicago Fire,
it was Catherine's father, who was at the helm of
a relief program to rebuild the city, who convinced him
not to move his business elsewhere. Katherine and Stanley had
first met at a ball in eighteen eighty nine, when
(06:38):
Catherine was just thirteen and Stanley was fourteen. Then sixteen
years later, on September first, nineteen o three, they were
both coincidentally at a resort outside of Boston known as
Beverly Farms. Stanley immediately picked up their friendship as though
they had never been apart. Even though Catherine actually found
this a little odd and off putting, it was awfully familiar.
(07:00):
Even behavior expectations at this time. Also a little familiar
was that within a month Stanley had proposed to her. Catherine, however,
was afraid that her ambition to become a surgeon would
be impossible as if she got married. Nonetheless, she eventually accepted,
then she broke it off, and she accepted again, then
(07:20):
she broke it off again. She wound up ending their
engagement three times before they eventually got married. Stanley, for
his part, was passionate and persistent, even going so far
as to go to Geneva uninvited after Catherine had called
off one of their engagements in an effort to try
to win her back. Aside from this, Ardor, Catherine found
(07:41):
some of his behavior troubling and erratic. For example, he
became obsessed about the fact that he had masturbated, and
he was terrified that this had somehow ruined his potential
to be a husband. But in spite of all of that,
the pair finally married on September fifteenth of nineteen o four. Yeah,
there were there were clearly a lot of different factors
(08:03):
going into Catherine's perpetual ending of their engagements and her
eluctance to get married to him, But she does seem
to have genuinely loved him, and in his more stable moments,
found him to be a nice, delightful person to be around. However,
after their marriage, it became clear almost immediately that Stanley
was really not in good mental health. The McCormick family
(08:26):
was also reported to just be extremely dysfunctional. Stanley's father
was described as a tyrant and his mother as a
religious zealot. His older sister was in full time care
due to her own mental illness, and biographers have described
his other siblings as sociopaths. Catherine hoped that removing Stanley
(08:47):
from Chicago and from his family's influence and all of
the pressures of their unhealthy family dynamics would help him recover. Instead,
just two years into their marriage, his condition deteriorated to
the point that he had to be hospitalized. He was
admitted to McLean Hospital for the Insane, and he was
diagnosed with dementia pray Cox of the catatonic type schizophrenia
(09:10):
basically at the age of thirty two. He was later
moved to Riven Rock, which is an estate in California
that had actually been purchased for the care of his
older sister, who had since been moved to a sanitarium.
That one description he had a family that had bought
an estate to provide care for his mentally ill older
(09:31):
sister sort of encapsulates a lot of stuff about the
McCormick family. Catherine's efforts to take care of Stanley would
be a huge part of the rest most of the
rest of her life, and it was also a source
of strain between her and his family. She and the
mccormicks had major differences of opinion and how he should
(09:55):
be cared for and treated. This battle was huge and ugly,
and sometimes it was dreamely public, to the point that
it took all of them to court on more than
one occasion, and was frequently covered as a scandal in
the newspapers. Compounding the situation was that Stanley's behavior toward
women in particular was so alarming and inappropriate that he
(10:17):
can actually only be cared for by male doctors and nurses.
For about twenty years, Catherine generally only saw her husband
from afar from some vantage point where he could not
see her. However, even as doctors and his family suggested,
repeating it repeatedly, that she divorced him or get an annulment,
Catherine refused to give up her role in Stanley's life
(10:40):
and care. One reason was that she really believed his
family were part of the problem and that they did
not have his best interests at heart when making decisions
on his behalf. But she had also been powerless to
stop the study the sudden deaths of her father and
her brother, and so that was probably also part of
what drove her who continued to be married to Stanley
(11:02):
and to try to find the best care for him.
We're not going to talk about the details here, but
Stanley's care in the dispute surrounding it were ongoing for
more than forty years. Gaps in Catherine's advocacy work were
often due to some kind of crisis with Stanley or
his family or his team of doctors. It was basically
(11:22):
an underlying layer of Katherine's life right up until Stanley's death.
After a brief word from one of our great sponsors,
we are going to talk about Katherine Dexter McCormick's role
in the suffrage movement. Katherine Dexter McCormick's first involvement in
the movement for women's suffrage was while she was still
in college. She joined the College Equal Suffrage League, which
(11:43):
had been formed by students from Radcliffe, Wellesley and Boston College.
McCormick was the first m I T student to join.
Through the nineteen teens, she was also active in the
Massachusetts Woman's Suffrage Alliance, where she toured cities and towns
in Massachusetts to race support for women's right to vote.
This included at one point speaking from the water in
(12:04):
Boston Harbor when police refused to allow the crowd to
congregate on the beach. She was also a big part
of keeping the Massachusetts branch of the National American Women's
Suffrage Association, or in a w s A financially a float,
as that organization got bigger and had some trouble making
its ends meet, in part because not all of the
(12:24):
new members paid their their dues on time. McCormick's work
in record keeping and sometimes having the awkward conversations getting
people to pay their delinquent dues got the organization back
on track. She eventually became treasurer of the organization and
a member of its board. Carrie Chapman Cat, who helped
(12:45):
found the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance, recruited McCormick to join
that organization as well. She'd heard McCormick speak and thought
her speaking and writing abilities, plus her fluency in multiple languages,
would make her a good choice to become the organizations
corresponding secretary. McCormick was eventually elected to that position. In
(13:05):
addition to doing extensive work speaking, writing, traveling, and working
within these organizations, McCormick also made a number of financial
contributions to the suffrage movement, including bailing out one of
the one organization's magazine that had fallen into debt. In
contrast to recent podcast subject Saffia Duleep Singh, whose support
(13:27):
of increasingly radical arms of the suffrage movement in Britain
was unwavering, McCormick was not in favor of more radical
or militant demonstrations. For example, after being asked for a
donation to the suffrage movement, Helen McGill White, who was
the first woman in the United States to earn a PhD,
wrote a letter to The New York Times decrying the
more militant suffragettes in Britain. White's letter ran into the
(13:50):
headline upbraids suffragists since they can done outrages. Mrs White
refuses Cash. McCormick, writing in her capacity as treasure or
of the n a w s A, responded in a
letter published under the headline on Militant Women, Treasurer of
National Suffrage Body says it is dumb. I just want
(14:11):
to take a moment to point out neither of these
women wrote these headlines right. Editors at the New York
Times did uh. In her letter, McCormick said, quote, whatever
may be the opinions held by our members, the fact
remains that the National Association is not a militant suffrage association,
that there is no militant suffrage association among our many branches. Moreover,
(14:36):
the work we are doing will bear any scrutiny which
may be directed upon it from those holding Mrs White's
point of view. These opinions held by the n a
w s a S members are an oblique reference to
Alice Paul. These letters came out about a month after
Paul's thirteen Women's suffrage parade in Washington, d C. Which
(14:57):
led to a confrontation with police. Along with many of
the naw SAYS younger members, Paul was willing to take
more aggressive steps to try to get more immediate results
for women's rights. Paul eventually split off from the naw
s A and formed her own organization, the Congressional Union,
in nineteen fourteen, taking the naw says more militant members
(15:20):
with her. The schism between the two organizations widened, with
Paul wanting more militant actions for more immediate change, while
the naw SA was willing to work more gradually and
less confrontationally, and with mccormicks supporting the naw says prevailing opinion.
That same year, McCormick was elected first Vice president of
(15:41):
the naw s A, where one of the tasks before
her was to revitalize the organization following the loss of
Paul and some of its members. She organized fundraising, She
fin tuned their logistics, She tried to truly separate their
aims from the Congressional Unions, and she put together plans
to lobby and stay that had not yet passed suffrage
(16:02):
bills for women d NAWSA and the rest of the
movement saw the results of their efforts in women gaining
the right to vote in an increasing number of states,
culminating in the Nineteenth Amendment, which was ratified in nineteen
twenty After another brief sponsor break, we will talk about
McCormick's work in the world of contraception. Once the nineteenth
(16:23):
Amendment had been ratified, Katherine Dexter McCormick continued to be
involved with women's voting rights through the League of Women Voters,
including serving as its vice president, But once women had
the right to vote, she had the time and energy
to focus on other matters, and one of those was contraception.
McCormick had several reasons for being interested in contraception, as
(16:45):
we noted at the top of the show quote prudent
sex was something that her mother had supported. At the time,
Schizophrenia was believed to be an inherited condition, with children
of schizophrenic parents certain to develop schizophrenia themselves. So even
of McCormick was not having a physical relationship with her husband,
she could easily see the importance of couples preventing pregnancy
(17:07):
for health reasons. But it was not just about medical necessity.
McCormick genuinely felt that women needed to be able to
control their own bodies and decide for themselves when or
whether to get pregnant. There could not possibly be equality
between the sexes in her mind, as long as women's
bodies and lives could be derailed by unplanned pregnancies and
(17:30):
unplanned children. McCormick meant birth control activist Margaret Sanger in
Boston in nineteen seventeen at a trial of a man
who had been arrested for distributing Sanger's pamphlets on birth control.
At the time, these pamphlets and other information about contraception
were considered to be obscenity under the Comstock Act, a
(17:51):
very broad federal statute that outlawed obscene literature. Information about
abortion and contraception were classified as obscene under the law.
After meeting Sanger, and at her request, mccormicks started smuggling
diaphragms back from her trips to Europe. Diaphragms were illegal
in the United States, but they were legal in parts
(18:12):
of Europe, and unlike condoms, they were a form of
contraception that women could control for themselves. McCormick would take
advantage of her family's chateau outside of Geneva, her fluency
in several languages, and her money to do this. She
would go to Europe, travel and pose as a scientist,
drawing on her knowledge of biology acquired at m I T.
(18:35):
She would buy up huge numbers of diaphragms and then
have them sewn into the linings and pockets of garments
so that she could smuggle them back into the United States.
She did this with more than one thousand diaphragms, and
although the records are unclear, most of this was probably
funded with her own money. Through the nineteen twenties, McCormick
(18:55):
was involved in birth control advocacy, going to meetings and
conferences and using her knowledge of biology to study reproduction.
She also dedicated some of her mental and financial resources
to endocrine research, having become convinced that her husband's mental
health issues were really due to a malfunctioning endocrine system.
She actually established the neuro Indocrine Research Foundation at Harvard
(19:17):
Medical School in n seven, and she funded other research
into the endocrine system as well, and as sort of
a side note, she established a hospital for the mentally
ill at Worcester State Hospital. Through the nineteen thirties, attitudes
in the United States were very gradually warmed toward the
idea of legal contraception, although the Catholic Church lobbied hard
(19:38):
against it. Some states began to repeal their obscenity laws
or pass specific exemptions for birth control literature. In nineteen
thirty seven, the American Medical Association reversed an earlier decision
and came out in support of artificial contraception under a
doctor's supervision and as part of a marriage. In ninety eight,
(19:59):
Margaret s Her announced that she was forming a Citizens
Committee for Planned Parenthood, which would later become the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America. She continued her birth control advocacy,
and McCormick was was vocal in her support of it
as well, even as it drew criticism from the press,
her mother, and Stanley's family. But in seven, Stanley McCormick,
(20:22):
by then one of the only two surviving McCormick siblings, died.
A handwritten will dated the day of their wedding was
found in Stanley's safe deposit box, giving his whole estate
to his wife. Lawyers told Stanley's remaining sister that this
will could not be contested, and Catherine Dexter McCormick inherited
the entire McCormick estate. It took her five years to
(20:45):
settle the whole estate, pay all the taxes, divest herself
of the harvester business and all of Stanley's property, But
once all of that was done, she basically turned her
sole focus to contraception. At this point, although popular support
for birth control was increasing, funding to create a reliable
contraceptive was almost non existent. On June eighth three, McCormick
(21:11):
and Sanger met with Dr Gregory Pinkis at the Worcester
Foundation for Experimental Biology in Worcester, Massachusetts. He'd been researching
hormones effects on contraception and saying or believed he could
develop an effective contraceptive. McCormick wrote him a check. Is
a little unclear exactly how many dollars she eventually gave him,
(21:31):
but she basically wound up uh funding all of the
work of Dr Pinkas, which was carried out in conjunction
with Dr minshit Chang and other doctors and researchers, almost
single handedly. Sometimes she funneled these funds through Planned Parenthood
for tax reasons, and she also kept an extremely careful
eye on the project, carefully reviewing their progress, very persistently,
(21:54):
coaxing and sometimes prodding it along. She was five years
old and she was adamant that she see a working
version of the pill in her lifetime. Pinkas and team
eventually started testing their combined oral contraceptive pill on human subjects,
and to be clear, some of the testing and development
(22:15):
methods used do not meet today's ethical standards. For example,
some were conducted on patients at an asylum. Others were
conducted out of existing birth control clinics in Puerto Rico,
but the women enrolled in the trial were often desperate
to prevent pregnancy and not necessarily made aware of the
drug's risks. Although this didn't run a foul of ethical
(22:36):
standards at the time, it absolutely would be unethical today. However,
in spite of their ethical problems, these trials proved that
the drug that Pinkas was developing worked. You could also
make this name general point about basically this entire podcast.
The suffrage movement that McCormick was part of largely excluded
black women and other minorities, and Margaret Sanger had ties
(22:57):
to the eugenics movement, which was really popular in the
twenties and thirties. So basically all of the things we
were talking about today, including various things that were tried
in Stanley's mental health care, had issues that were somewhere
between between troubling and abhorrent. A century later, in nineteen
fifty seven, enovid, which combined synthetic estrogen with synthetic progestine,
(23:22):
was approved for use in regulating menstrual cycles. Of course,
in regulating the cycle, it was also preventing ovulation. The
FDA approved its use for this purpose as the first
oral contraceptive in nineteen sixty. With that out of the way,
McCormick turned her focus to the fact that m I
T did not have adequate housing for female students. In
(23:43):
nineteen sixty eight, Women's Residents Stanley McCormick Hall opened its doors.
It was m i t s first residence halls exclusively
for women, and it quadrupled the number of women's students
the m I T could house, bringing the number up
to two hundred. The dormitory's dedication took place three months
after mc cormis death at the age of two. She
died on December ninety seven of a stroke. Her financial
(24:06):
contributions to the creation of the pill were even then
largely forgotten. Her death was not even reported as news. However,
in her will, she gave sizeable donations to the Planned
Parenthood Federation and to Stanford University to assist women who
wanted to get a medical degree. She also made contributions
posthumously to numerous civic organizations, as well as several that
(24:29):
were devoted to art and music. She did really all
of this in Stanley's honor. She also established the Katherine
Dexter McCormick Library to be housed at the Planned Parenthood
Federation offices in New York. And that is Katherine Dexter McCormick.
That's another one of those people, and it comes up
often in this podcast or I hear their life story
and think I'm the laziest person alive, like so much work.
(24:53):
You and I have joked off off Mike about how
this episode on Katherine Dexter McCormick and one that is
going to run around the same time. You may all
have heard it already about the Declaration of Sentiments. Both
could have been two parters because they're so involved, But
then we would have had three two parters in a
month that we're all about suffrage, which we love this topic,
(25:17):
but our listeners like variety, which is why why we
we did not do it that way. However, the book
that I got about Katherine Dexter McCormick is enormous. It's
it's like, how long is it. I'm gonna pick it
up on Mike here and flip through it. Uh, Okay,
it's only three pages long, but it seems enormous. It's
(25:42):
got a whole It's got so much more information in
it about UM, about Stanley's mental health care, about various
friendships and relationships that she developed with other women in
the suffrage movement, like just the so much other stuff
that we did not get into you. Um, she's pretty amazing.
That book is called Catherine Dexter McCormick, Pioneer for Women's Rights. Um.
(26:04):
And Oh, the thing that I was working around to
you is that one of the things that is funny
to me about having done this episode and the one
that is coming out either already or soon about the
the Declaration of Sentiments and the Seneca Falls Convention, is, Uh,
(26:25):
I wonder how those women's lives may have been different
had they had access to contraception, because so many of
them had seven or eight children, and more than likely
they had seven or eight children because they had no
choice about methods of not having children. That were actually
reliable and effective. So anyway, uh, that's Katherine Dexter McCormick.
(26:52):
I also have listener mail. I have blister mail is
not about Katherine Dexter McCormick. It is about moonshine. It
is from Jack's sax says Dear Tracy and Holly. I'm
a proud alum of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, So
your episode on moonshine reminded me of a cultural reference.
(27:12):
If your listeners live in the South and or watch
SEC sports, they are probably aware of the unofficial U
t K fight song Rocky Top. However, the band only
plays the chorus at games, and the verses are full
of strange mountain culture. In the second verse, there is
a direct reference to federal agents looking for stills you
touched on the legal moonshine business, which I personally watched
(27:33):
explode while working in two different local liquor liquor stores.
Popcorn Sutton was a long time producer of moonshine, and
after his death, his recipe is now being used for
legal corn whiskey. It has caused a lot of debate
on the area's cultural history and what is appropriate representation.
I could go on for a while about the idea
of quote poor stupid Southerners as a stereotype, but y'all
(27:56):
have addressed this, and thank you. I will say that
a lot of people still get their shine from some
local producer and guard their sources jealously. Personally, the best
I've ever had was produced in a very urban area
of Knoxville by a passionate advocate of the community and
mountain heritage, and one of his best flavors was Rosemary
your figure, and and then he sends a little note
(28:17):
that's less related about things that he does while listening.
Thank you, Jacks. One of the reasons that I wanted
to read this email is that I actually wanted to
talk about Popcorn Sutton in that episode. Um. He was
a character. Uh. It was very well known, like in
(28:38):
the Maggie Valley area of North Carolina and parts of
North Carolina and Tennessee. And there are lots of videos
of him and documentaries of him about his moonshining. And
one of the reasons that we didn't I didn't end
up putting him in the and the final outline was
that it's a very sad story. He he uh, was
(29:01):
he had a he had a raid. There was a
federal raid on his operation, and he had already been
on house arrest, and he was sentenced to prison, um,
and he wound up taking his own life rather than
returning to prison. And it was just such a huge
story with so many layers to it that I could
not find a good place to put it in the
already long story of Moonshine that we had. In that.
(29:22):
The other thing was, I went looking around for a
video of him to share on our social media after
that episode came out, because I had kind of wanted
to tell a little bit of his story, but I
couldn't find a place for it, and I could not
find any in which he was not cussing a blue streak,
because that is how he talked. M And the one
(29:43):
that I did find is a very lovely photo essay
which has a picture of his tombstone on it, which
has what many people consider to be the mother of
all swear words on it, so like even then, even
on his tombstone, he had a very a very foul
mouth full of foul language. Um. But anyway, he's a
(30:05):
very interesting character and his his story has a lot
of parallels to the overall story of Moonshine in that
part of the the Avalacha Mountains. So uh, thank you
again Jack for writing. If you would like to write
to us, we are at History Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot
com slash miss in History and on Twitter at miss
and History. Are tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler
(30:27):
dot com, and are on Pinterest at pinterest dot com
slash missed in History. We have an Instagram where we
are also missing History. If you would like to learn
more about what we've talked about saying, you can come
to our parent company's website, which is how stuff Works
dot com. Put the words Land Parenthood in the search
bar and you will find how Land Parenthood Works that
dispels a lot of misconceptions about the organization. You can
(30:50):
also come to our website, which is missed in History
dot com, and you will find show notes, an archive
of every single episode we've ever done, lots of other
cool stuff, so you can do all that and a
whole lot more at house to works dot com or
myth and history dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com,
(31:14):
m
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Tracy Wilson
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