birthcontrol

Sweet like a poisoned apple.

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thanks for sharing!

Such a sympathetic face.

She doesn't look like a radical, but she was for her time..maybe that direct look at the camera was a statement. I love the way she's done her hair. :)

Katharine Dexter McCormick (August 27, 1875 – December 28, 1967) was a U.S. biologist, suffragist, philanthropist and, after her husband's death, heir to a substantial part of the McCormick family fortune. She is remembered for funding most of the research necessary to develop the first birth control pill. Notably, her husband does not have a Wikipedia entry (yet)...

She was the granddaughter of Judge Samuel William Dexter, the founder of Dexter Village, MI (about ten miles west of my hometown of Ann Arbor), and the daughter of Wirt Dexter, prominent Chicago attorney and financier. (The Louis Sullivan-designed Wirt Dexter Building, a Chicago landmark, burned to ashes a few years ago.) Katharine's husband was the fabulously wealthy Stanley McCormick of Chicago, a member of the family that invented the McCormick Reaper and founded the International Harvester Company. Unfortunately, Stanley McCormick went mad.

She's also familiar as one of the main characters in TC Boyle's Riven Rock, a novel based on the story of Stanley McCormick's madness and retreat to an estate near Santa Barbara.

episodesandaccidents, Wystan and pennylrichardsca--thank you for identifying Katherine Dexter McCormick. We will add some of these details to the record when we update.

There's a brief bio and a much later photo of her at this page (scroll down, a little past half way): www.med.yale.edu/library/historical/about/founders/donors... "Gertrude Van Wagenen, a Yale research scientist, bequeathed, through her brother, Anthony van Wagenen, her marvelous collection of illustrated anatomical works as well as goiter dolls and ivory anatomical manikins. Married to Crawford F. Failey, M.D., who inherited great wealth, she began collecting on travels abroad in the 1920s. Van Wagenen obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Iowa in 1919. Beginning in 1931, commuting from her home in New York City, she established a research laboratory and colony of macaque monkeys, at Yale, and carried out pioneering research on the reproductive biology of primates. Her modest official title as Research Associate in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Lecturer in Anatomy, belied her many scientific achievements. Van Wagenen’s collection included several triple folio works such as the eighteenth-century color mezzotints of anatomies by Jacques Gautier d’Agoty." She doesn't have a Wikipedia entry. Yet.

These are wonderful details, Penny. Let's get her up on Wikipedia! Effie, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Beautiful portrait !

Smithsonian Institution Done! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Van_Wagenen

Penny, way to go! Her name will grow in notoriety! Cheers, Effie