Katharine McCormick

Katharine McCormick paid for the development of the contraceptive pill out of her own fortune, and it would probably not have happened when it did without her. She was the second woman to graduate from MIT, in biology, in 1904, and married Stanley McCormick of the harvester family weeks later; he was diagnosed with schizophrenia within two years and she spent four decades managing his care and funding research into the illness, while his family fought her in court over control of the estate. She was a suffragist, treasurer and vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and afterwards of the League of Women Voters. She smuggled diaphragms into the United States from Europe in the 1920s, buying them in bulk in Switzerland and shipping them in crates of books, for Margaret Sanger's clinics. When her husband died in 1947 she inherited the money outright, and Sanger directed her to Gregory Pincus, who had the idea for a hormonal contraceptive and no funding because no pharmaceutical company or research foundation would touch the subject. She gave what amounted to over two million dollars, most of the programme's total cost, and visited the laboratory regularly enough to be a presence in it rather than a name on a cheque. The pill was approved for contraceptive use in 1960, when she was eighty-five. She left the bulk of her estate to Stanford medical school and to Planned Parenthood, and paid for a residence hall at MIT specifically to let more women enrol, since the shortage of women's housing had been used to cap admissions. She had insisted on studying biology rather than a subject MIT considered suitable, and fought the institute over its requirement that women wear hats in the laboratory, on the grounds that they were a fire hazard. She won.

• Lived: 1875 CE – 1967 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: activist