The Mother of the Pill
Katharine Dexter McCormick was a woman stranger than fiction. She single-handedly financed the development of the contraceptive pill. Almost no one's heard of her.
The power of gender-balanced governments to save democracy
Latest on WOMEN MONEY POWER, the book
A few weeks ago I wrote about Pauli Murray, the legal scholar and civil rights activist who I profile extensively in my book.
Murray is, unequivocally, one of the most important characters in our collective fight for female economic empowerment. She is not a household name. She’s celebrated in some circles and in parts of her North Carolina hometown of Durham, where the Pauli Murray Center invites tourists and historians to learn about her life and legacy, but she enjoys nowhere near the degree of celebrity afforded to Betty Friedan or Eleanor Roosevelt for their efforts to fight gender inequality.
Rosa Parks has claimed an unchallenged spot in history curricula around the world; but despite the fact that Murray was arrested for almost exactly the same act of defiance about decade earlier, she might feature as a footnote. As Kathryn Schulz wrote for The New Yorker in April 2017, Murray’s lifelong fate was to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes. Her boldness, her gender fluidity, and her readiness to defy every stereotype and norm that she encountered throughout her life made her so unquantifiable and impossible to categorize that many scholars and academics, rather than attempting to do so, wrote around her. Some scratched her from their books entirely.
There are other women in my book about whom the same can be said. One of them is Katharine Dexter McCormick.
Katharine was born in 1875 in Michigan and raised in Chicago. In May 1890, her father suffered a sudden and severe heart attack and died before his fourteen-year-old daughter’s eyes. Just four years later, her only brother, Samuel, succumbed to meningitis. Devastated, Katharine vowed to pursue a career in medicine, and, propelled by boundless ambition and a healthy portion of idealism inherited from her late father, she set her sights on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Shortly after her brother’s funeral, Katharine wrote to Samuel’s grieving lover, a lady named Elsie Clews, who would later become a dear friend: “I have concluded that justice seemed better served to those who took control of their lives.”
In 1896, Katharine started the prerequisite work for passing MIT’s arduous entrance exam. It would take her three years, but in September 1899, at the age of twenty-four, she sailed through the exam, forcing the school’s staid governing body to welcome—albeit reluctantly—what was still an extreme rarity at the time: a female student.
That in itself is a remarkable feat, worthy of a spot in history books, and Katharine’s trailblazing could have ended there. But it didn’t.
In 1904, Katharine married Stanley McCormick, the wealthy heir to an agricultural machinery empire. Shortly after the wedding, Stanley’s health began to deteriorate, ultimately rendering him unable to live an independent life. He was later diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and Katharine became consumed with the idea of what would have happened if she had mothered a child of his—if they had passed his condition onto a next generation. Birth control, she gradually concluded, had to become a reality.
Not long after, Katharine crossed paths with Margaret Sanger who at the time was considered the U.S.’s best-known birth control advocate. The two women started collaborating. Their collective mission would prove grand and ambitious. Setbacks followed every step of progress towards the creation of what the pair came to think of as a magic pill. But they got there in the end: in 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive, a milestone that was only possible because of the finances provided by a single very wealthy individual: Katharine Dexter McCormick.
As we reflect on a historic milestone that was, undeniably, one of the most important developments in the broad narrative of female economic empowerment, it’s important to recognize a very dark side of the story. Sanger had indisputable ties to the eugenics movement which sought to “improve” the human race through planned breeding based on genetic traits. Aside from the birth control advocacy work for which she was, and still is, best known, Sanger also supported the sterilization of some people with mental illnesses.
Years later, Esther Katz, a retired associate professor of history at New York University and founder of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, which aims to collate and edit Sanger’s historical papers and letters, told the Washington Post that Sanger also believed that if a woman gave birth to a large number of children, the younger children would be weaker. To advance the birth control movement, Katz explained, she even spoke with the Ku Klux Klan. In 2020, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced that it would remove Sanger’s name from one of its Manhattan clinics in an attempt to reckon with her complicated legacy.
The doctors and researchers who dedicated their careers to developing the pill—whose work Katharine largely bankrolled—at times conducted their research in a horrifying manner. It was a mostly unregulated period in U.S. scientific history—a time when research subjects were frequently thought of as expendable commodities. In 1947, the Nuremberg Code established the importance of informed consent, but it was not a legally binding document. The Kefauver–Harris Drug Amendments to the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, requiring proof of the safety and efficacy of medications, were only passed by Congress in 1962, and the Belmont Report, which required proof of drug safety and “respect, beneficence, and justice” throughout all human trials, was only published in 1979. Some have compared the contraceptive pill trials the doctors in questioned organized and oversaw in Puerto Rico to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the government conducted research, without their consent, on African American men suffering from the disease in Alabama from 1932 until 1972.
Katharine Dexter McCormick’s legacy—though necessarily complicated by her association with known racists and eugenicists—lives on, thanks to the lasting impact of her activism and philanthropy. But compared to Sanger, and the doctors who she financially supported, her name is relatively unfamiliar even in the world of medical history. Often, she’s simply referred to as Mrs. Stanley McCormick. At best she’s commended for being one of the first women to earn a biology degree from MIT.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, almost all women in the United States today will at some point in their lives use birth control. Data from the 2017 to 2019 National Survey of Family Growth shows that more than six in every ten women between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine in America use contraception, of which about 14 percent use “the pill.”
The simplicity of its common, monosyllabic nickname is testament to the revolutionary effect it has had, not only on women but on communities, countries, cultural standards, and undoubtedly even entire economies. As early as the 1930s, scientists had been experimenting with ways to arrest female ovulation and prevent pregnancy. The invention of the “magic pill” was, therefore, always a possibility, but McCormick was the person who enabled it to be pushed out into the world much sooner than it otherwise might have been. And unlike that of so many of the people who shared her goal, McCormick’s driving force was not eugenics or racism, but a desire for women to be able to enjoy fulfilling, independent lives.
As the writer and historian Armond Fields notes in one of the only biographies ever to be written about McCormick, “At the beginning of the last century, the acknowledged achievement of a woman did not assure her acceptance as a self-determining equal, because a male-dominated society refused to recognize women as self-determining citizens. In response to this societal mindset, Katharine became a dedicated advocate for women’s rights.” He added: “Her determination and commitment, while clashing with fierce opponents and overcoming sizeable barriers, contrived to make things happen and carried her efforts to successful conclusion.” Loretta McLaughlin, in her book on the development of the birth control pill, candidly describes her as “a woman more strange and powerful than fiction could ever invent.”
Without Katharine’s vigor, steely principles, and passion for empowerment, decades might have passed before women would have been able to take control of their bodies, careers, and lives.
Pick up a copy of my book WOMEN MONEY POWER to read more about Katharine (the Kindle edition is currently on sale in the U.S. at only $3.99) and her almost unbelievable lifelong mission to give women the right and ability to choose when to have children (which includes an account of her smuggling diaphragms into the U.S. by sewing them into the lining of her clothes. Just wild).
Her chapter is called “Wonderful Things in Small Packets.” I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
How to Save Democracy
Elsewhere last week, I was struck by some firm statements made by Amina Mohammed, the United Nations deputy secretary-general on the topic of the importance of having women in leadership.
Speaking on Wednesday to a conference in Greece via video link, Mohammed noted that this year we face an almost unprecedented opportunity around the world to elected more women into government.
“Advancing women’s participation is critical not only because women are significantly underrepresented in decision-making, but also because the future of democracy and achievement of peaceful societies depends on it,” she said.
About 50 countries (which collectively account for about half of the world’s population) are slated to hold national elections this year. Citing data published this month by the Switzerland-based Inter-Parliamentary Union. the Associated Press reported that the proportion of female lawmakers stood at 26.9% in 2023 internationally which was only marginally higher than the year before.
More gender-balanced parliaments would help to safeguard democracy Ethiopia’s president, Sahle-Work Zewde, told the conference at which Mohammed was speaking.
“The current narrative is that we are in an era of democratic backsliding,” she said. “When democracy is under threat, it will have a negative impact on women,” she added. “In any given country, women constitute the majority of the electorate. This is a fact. (But) only a few men make it to the top position … So things have to change.”
WOMEN MONEY POWER: The Book
Another week of brilliant events and conversations celebrating the launch of WOMEN MONEY POWER. Thank you to NZZ, a national newspaper in Switzerland, my home country, which ran a great profile of me and the book.
Earlier this month I had so much fun making my New York public radio debut when Brian Lehrer invited me to come on his show. You can listen to the whole 23-minute segment here, featuring some great callers’ questions and an excerpt from that speech in the Barbie movie.
And finally, stay tuned for something really special that I’ve been working on with PBS NewsHour and Mae, the Rosie the Riveter, who features in my book and who regular readers of this newsletter will probably already feel a deep affection for.
Upcoming Events
NEW YORK
TOMORROW- March 26 (6pm) I’ll be at Dear Mama, up in Manhattanville next to Columbia Business School. I’ll be in conversation with Anushka Salinas, President and COO of Rent the Runway. It’s free to attend but please register here!
LONDON
April 8 (7pm) I’ll be at Waterstones, Trafalgar Square, in conversation with the author of WOMEN WHO WON, Ros Ball. Buy your ticket here!
April 11 (6pm) I’ll be at The Conduit Club in conversation with Paul van Zyl, Co-Founder of The Conduit. Register here!
Great post. I've been on the pill for years now, but never knew the history behind it. I'd like to come to the event on 7th April, but the link to buy a ticket takes me to a 404 error. Please update it as I've searched on the Waterstones website and the event doesn't appear. Is the event sold out? Thanks.