Katharine Dexter McCormick
Women Rights Champion
Katharine Dexter McCormick was an outstanding champion of women’s political and reproductive rights. Given her vast fortune (her lawyer once said that she couldn’t even spend the interest on her interest), she was in a position to financially back the causes in which she believed.
She was born in 1875 in Dexter, Michigan, a town founded by her grandfather. Her father was a prominent Chicago attorney, and her parents imbued Katharine with the importance of social welfare and a sense of social justice. After her father’s untimely death, she and her mother moved to Boston, and in the fall of 1899, Katharine entered MIT to study biology with the intent of becoming a surgeon. Despite the hostility she sometimes faced from the male-dominated student body and faculty, in 1904 she became the second woman to earn a degree from that institution.
While at MIT, she became reacquainted with Stanley McCormick, whom she had briefly met back in Chicago. He was the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the grain reaper, an invention that had made the family’s fortune. In the 1890s, the McCormicks had bought and developed an 87-acre estate in Montecito, Riven Rock.
