MIT's woman lost to history finally found

A woman lost to history, finally found
By Alex Beam, Globe Staff, 9/2/2003

It is not often that a new book elicits pure, unvarnished enthusiasm from me. But I am over the moon to see the new biography "Katharine Dexter McCormick: Pioneer for Women's Rights" by Armond Fields. Where to begin? Katharine McCormick was the rare woman who fought for a bachelor of science degree from MIT at the beginning of the last century. They didn't make it easy for her; she spent seven years in conditions that we might call harassment before coming away with a degree in 1904.

Her payback? She became one of the "Tech's" most enthusiastic benefactors. Until she donated MIT's first women's dorm -- Stanley McCormick Hall, opened in 1963, and still standing -- she paid taxi fares for female students, who were forced to commute from a small dorm across the river on Bay State Road.

(MIT has a history of receiving generous gifts from disaffected undergraduates. Former Teledyne Corp. chairman Richard Simmons, who gave $20 million for the newly constructed Simmons Hall, has said of his MIT years: "It really wasn't a very pleasant experience.")

But McCormick's involvement with MIT is just a footnote to her remarkable life story. She abandoned her dream of becoming a doctor when she was swept off her feet at a Beverly Farms resort by a handsome young man driving a motorcar, still a rarity in 1903. He turned out to be one of the richest men in America, Stanley McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune.

Stanley was insane, but that didn't emerge in time for Katharine to call off their 1904 wedding at the Hotel Beau Rivage outside of Geneva. When he became too mentally ill to function, she helped move him to an estate outside of Santa Barbara, Calif., and scoured the world for the best doctors and psychiatrists to heal him. Stanley's California vicissitudes were fictionalized in T. Coraghessan Boyle's 1998 novel, "Riven Rock."

In 1929, Katharine squared off against her wealthy in-laws in court to win custody of her debilitated husband. The "trial of the century," as the pre-O.J. proceedings were called, ended in a draw. When the McCormick family later tried to cut Katharine out of Stanley's $35 million will, they were stymied after her lawyers produced a love letter, written in Geneva during their honeymoon, promising her his entire fortune.

When not attending to her husband, McCormick plunged into the women's suffrage movement. She worked first for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Alliance, and then for the national organization. Later she made huge financial contributions to birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, and to the organization that became Planned Parenthood.

For seven years she was a principal financial backer of the Worcester laboratory where Drs. Gregory Pincus, John Rock, and others were synthesizing the world's first birth control pill. She paid for the champagne popped at the lab on the day in 1960 when the pill was approved by the FDA -- "the most sweeping sociomedical revolution in history," as The New York Times opined at the time.

After helping to fund the pill, she threw herself into philanthropy, with huge gifts to Stanley's alma mater, Princeton, and to Stanford University. But her heart belonged to MIT, which had furnished her the intellectual tools to debate the motley crew of psychiatrists assigned to her husband, and to understand the work of the Worcester scientists.

One of the last guests she received in the parlor of her Back Bay townhouse before she died in 1967 was MIT president James Killian, who had just dedicated McCormick Hall. Morbidly infirm, she kept him waiting while she donned a hat and gloves to receive him properly. "When Killian visited her, she would say, `I would never think of talking with a person of your stature informally in my home,' " reports Howard Johnson, himself a former president of MIT.

She was indeed, as John Rock's biographer Loretta McLaughlin called her, "a woman more strange and powerful than fiction could ever invent."