Born in 1875 in a Michigan town named after her family, Katharine had lineage, serious lineage. Her great-grandfather had served in both John Adams’ and Thomas Jefferson’s cabinets and was honored to read George Washington’s eulogy before the Senate.
Intelligent and determined, Katharine wanted to make her own mark. She started off strong, becoming the second woman to graduate from MIT, the first with a biology degree. Then, along came one of the nation’s most eligible bachelors, Stanley McCormick: cum laude Princeton grad, Northwestern law student, and son of Reaper King Cyrus McCormick. It seemed a perfect match: two powerful families, two brilliant and attractive young people with promising futures.
But Katharine had her doubts. While Stanley ticked all the right boxes, there were times when Stanley was erratic, overly attentive or oddly withdrawn, even paranoid. Katharine wrote it off as pre-wedding jitters and the crushing influence of Stanley’s overprotective mother. In fact, both mothers-in-law tagged along on the honeymoon, hovering.
It is believed the marriage was never consummated, Stanley apparently panicking at the thought of intimacy. He withdrew, retreating further and further into himself. Then he started becoming violent, lashing out at random individuals — his German teacher, an elevator operator, a dentist. Katharine feared for her own safety.
Stanley was committed to a mental hospital with the diagnosis of schizophrenia with severe sexual side effects. He attacked his caregivers, spent weeks in catatonic states, and was ultimately installed in Riven Rock, a McCormick estate in California. At 8,000 square feet on 87 acres, it was a lovely retreat. But with bars on the windows and furniture bolted to the floor, it was also undeniably a prison. Stanley would spend the rest of his life there, overseen by a bustling staff of all-male doctors and nurses.
Fresh off her MIT biology courses, Katharine argued for endocrine testing. She was denied, many of the doctors blaming Stanley’s condition on the fact that he had married a strong woman. Too much pressure! Keep her away from him! This battle would continue for decades.
Instead of raising a family, which had been Katharine’s heartfelt desire, she became a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, serving as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and, after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the vice president of the League of Women Voters. A fervent supporter of the right to birth control, Katharine worked with European diaphragm manufacturers, placing orders which she then had sewn into the hems of her gowns and coats, secretly loading up her traveling trunks with thousands of the forbidden devices and delivering them to Margaret Sanger’s clinics in the US. Sanger introduced Katharine to Gregory Pincus and she became a key funder of the birth control pill.
Katharine donated millions to the causes she believed in, including funding Stanley McCormick Hall at MIT to house female students, $5 million to Planned Parenthood, and major gifts to support female physicians and endocrinology. Oh, and doctors today believe that chemical imbalances in the brain are an underlying factor for schizophrenia — proving Katharine’s long-ignored hypothesis true. She died in 1967 at 92.
Written by guest contributor Andrea Friederici Ross