Born 150 years ago this week, the philanthropist Katharine McCormick (1875–1967) could be said to have sparked a global revolution, though little remembered for it today.
In a poem written the year she died, Philip Larkin joked: “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three ... between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.”
That may have been true (sort of) in England. But in McCormick’s America, the start date was a little earlier: 1960, when the Food and Drug Administration approved use of the first birth control pill.
The sexual revolution quickly followed – even if, as the 45-year-old Larkin lamented, it was “rather late” for him.
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McCormick was a trained biologist, who had been one of the few women science students in Boston’s MIT during the 1890s (and as such had to wear a hat in laboratory classes until successfully arguing that it was a fire hazard).
But she contributed to the pill’s development mainly with money. Already rich from her own family, she became multiply more so when marrying into the McCormicks, a Chicago dynasty of Irish and Scottish Americans who amassed a huge fortune in agricultural machinery.
She had chosen marriage over medical school. But her husband was already showing signs of mental illness, soon afterwards diagnosed as schizophrenia.
So, with no children and a partner who spent the rest of his life in psychiatric care, she devoted herself instead to philanthropic causes, especially the rights of women.
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Central to the McCormick fortune was the reaper and binder, a mechanised harvester invented in the 1830s by Cyrus McCormick, building on experiments by his father Robert, a grandson of emigrants from Scotland and the north of Ireland.
The family’s Derry and Antrim ancestors are usually described as Ulster-Scots. But among their many mentions in the newspaper archives is a mini-polemic on this theme from 1930, in the Kerry Reporter’s “Chicago Notes” column, which took umbrage on their behalf at attempts to distance them from the Emerald Isle in general.
“The head of the McCormick family, some years ago, protested against his ancestors being classed as ‘Scotch-Irish’ in a pro-British publication, stating that he knew no reason for such classification, as he and his predecessors recognised their Irish ancestry and ... were very proud of this fact,” it wrote.
The columnist, himself clearly “sound on the national question”, went on:
“The McCormicks of Chicago ... have always been friendly to and supported Ireland’s cause. The late senator McCormick, for Illinois, supported the Irish agitation against America’s entry into the League of Nations and voted against it and other schemes of the pro-Britishers in this country. It is as well for the friends of Ireland to remember those things at election time ...”
In any case, the McCormick Reaper was a global revolutionary in its own right. At first horse-drawn and later adapted for tractors, it became a staple of Irish agricultural life too, and remained so well into the second half of the 20th century.
Katharine McCormick – who in later years funded construction of housing for women at MIT and bequeathed her own home to the Art Institute of Chicago – was not the only philanthropist in the extended family.
Also notable was a woman who died in this week of August 1932, having spent her vast fortune on a range of causes. She too had married into the farm machinery clan, although also very rich to start with, as hinted by her full name: Edith Rockefeller McCormick.
The main focus of Rockefeller McCormick’s philanthropy was psychotherapy – she was an enthusiastic supporter of Carl Jung – rather than contraception. But, as an émigré in Zurich, she earned a footnote in literary history by first assisting with the conception of James Joyce’s Ulysses and later acting as a temporary prophylactic.
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During the initial phase, she provided Joyce with 1,000 Swiss francs a month: more than enough to keep him supplied with his favourite Fendant de Sion wine and other needs.
Then, probably because he refused to subject himself to psychoanalysis by her beloved Jung, and because the latter’s Swiss puritan streak did not approve of Joyce’s drinking, she cut it off.
Joyce learned of the latter development when calling to the bank to collect his monthly allowance one day, only to be told: “Der kredit ist erschöpft”. Moving to Trieste in reduced circumstances soon afterwards, he lamented the local wine and added: “As for Ulysses, it is – like me – on the rocks.”
He got it off the rocks again thanks to his more reliable benefactor, Harriet Weaver, and took revenge on the capricious Rockefeller McCormick in the book’s Nighttown chapter when making her the model for his sadistic socialite with a riding crop, Mrs Mervyn Tallboys.
By 1922, Ulysses was being smuggled from Paris to the United States. So were other items then available in France but illegal across the Atlantic.
Perhaps the same ships that brought the first copies of Joyce’s book across the Atlantic also had as a passenger Katharine McCormick. On repeated voyages between 1922 and 1925, she smuggled hundreds of diaphragms from Europe, sewn into her clothing, for use by American women.
