The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (14 page)

The study of hormones was new. In fact, the word was coined only in 1905 to describe the chemical messengers secreted by glands and carried to target organs to do a specific job. Katharine McCormick read enough to become convinced that hormones were likely to blame for her husband’s condition, and she urged Stanley’s doctors to consider hormone treatments. But her access to her husband’s doctors—and even to her husband—was limited. The doctors McCormick hired to run Riven Rock, reluctant to take orders even from their employer (in part because she was a woman and in part because they were doctors), wouldn’t let her come near her husband, saying that the presence of a woman would send Stanley into uncontrollable paroxysms of violence.

While she supervised her husband’s medical care as best she could, Katharine McCormick found herself longing for something more. In 1909 she began volunteering with the women’s suffrage movement, speaking at rallies, organizing protests, and providing badly needed funding. Often she was among the oldest women in a room full of young firebrands, but she was wealthy and smart and became a powerful figure in the movement. Mistreated by men at MIT, abandoned by a father who died young, and now all but widowed by her mentally ill husband, Katharine grew increasingly determined to fight for women’s rights. She became vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and, after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, served as the first vice president of the League of Women Voters. At about that time, in the summer of 1921, McCormick began to collaborate with Sanger, who was busy planning the first American Birth Control Conference at the Plaza Hotel in New York. These two powerfully independent women sat at a table as though going over battle plans, papers spread before them,
plotting their attack
. The birth-control movement intrigued McCormick. She shuddered to think what might have happened if she and Stanley had conceived a child and passed on his sickness. But that wasn’t all. Without birth control, any woman might become a prisoner to her husband, a mere breeder. What was the point in fighting for women’s rights? What was the point in sending women to college? What was the point in asking women to fight for equality when all they could look forward to was getting pregnant?

Sanger had carried the movement far on her own, but by 1923 McCormick had taken a central role in it. She served on boards, donated money to help publish the
Birth Control Review
, and helped Sanger open the nation’s first legal birth-control clinic in Brooklyn. Known as the Clinical Research Bureau, it stayed on the right side of the law by positioning itself as a center for the
study
—not the distribution—of contraception. Of course, the clinic did distribute contraception, and it quickly ran out. Demand far exceeded supply. Diaphragms were routinely smuggled into the country from Canada, but still the Bureau couldn’t get enough.

Katharine proposed bringing in more from Europe, and developed a plan for doing it. In May 1923, she sailed across the Atlantic with eight pieces of luggage,
including three large trunks
. While there, she bought more large trunks, explaining that she intended to purchase many of the “latest fashions” during her trip. She met with diaphragm manufacturers, placed her orders, and had the devices shipped to her chateau. Then she hired local seamstresses to sew the diaphragms into newly purchased clothing, put the clothing on hangers, and packed the exquisite dresses and coats in tissue. Eight large trunks were loaded, sent through customs, and carried aboard the ship as Katharine sailed for home, handing out generous gratuities at every station. Katharine McCormick, aristocrat, smuggler, rebel, arrived at the clinic by taxi trailing a truck containing the most exquisitely packaged diaphragms the world had ever seen—more than a thousand in all, enough to last the clinic a year.

In 1927, McCormick offered her chateau as the site of the first international summit on birth control, known as the World Population Conference, organized by Margaret Sanger. But McCormick did not attend. By then, she was caught up in a fight with her husband’s family. It started with disagreement about how best to care for Stanley and escalated into a court battle over who should have legal custody of the insane millionaire. “R
ICH
F
AMILY
B
ADLY
S
PLIT
,” read one headline,
which was putting it mildly
.

Year after year, McCormick gave herself to these two unpleasant and ultimately hopeless tasks, tending to her husband and feuding with his family. She donated money to Planned Parenthood and in 1942 worked with Sanger in an unsuccessful attempt to challenge Massachusetts’s restrictive birth-control law. She met occasionally with Sanger to strategize and told the crusading feminist that she believed women would never be free of male domination until they gained control of the reproductive process. She felt a duty to fight for that cause, she said, but there was little she could do so long as most of her energies were devoted to Stanley.

On January 19, 1947, at four forty-five in the afternoon, Stanley Robert McCormick died of pneumonia. For more than forty years he had lived in isolation, his mind ravaged by disease, his wife held at a distance, his enormous wealth no help to him whatsoever. Katharine wrote her husband’s obituary for the
Santa Barbara News-Press
, noting that her husband’s money had been “bestowed generously on many charities and worthwhile institutions” and that the development of the Riven Rock estate had played an important part in the community’s economic growth. She went on to note in the obituary that it had cost $115,000 ($1.2 million by today’s standards) a year to maintain Riven Rock, and that her husband’s medical care had
cost another $108,000 a year
($1.1 million). Finally, she pointed out that Mr. McCormick’s gardeners had contributed greatly to local horticulture and supported the town’s annual Flower Show. The obituary read as if Mrs. McCormick, now seventy-two years old, were attempting to justify the enormous time and money she’d dedicated to what had been, essentially, a lost cause.

When a probative clerk dug through Stanley McCormick’s safety deposit box, he found a forty-year-old sheet of hotel stationery, crumpled and yellow. It read: “I hereby bequeath my entire estate to my wife, Katharine Dexter McCormick. I also make her the
executrix of the estate
.” The document had been written and signed on the day of their wedding. Katharine would inherit more than thirty-five million dollars, including
almost thirty-two thousand shares
in the McCormick-owned company, International Harvester.

Sanger, too, was now a widow,
her husband having died in 1943
. For Sanger, the death of J. Noah Slee had no great impact. She had felt no passion for Slee in the first place, and so she had little trouble getting on with her life and work. Also, most of her husband’s stock and real estate had
long ago been transferred to her name
.

But for Katharine McCormick, everything changed with Stanley’s death. It took her almost five years to settle her husband’s estate and come to terms with the Bureau of Internal Revenue, but once those onerous jobs were done, she knew exactly what she wanted to do with her time and money.

NINE

A Shotgun Question

I
N JANUARY 1952,
before departing on a trip to the Far East, Sanger stopped to visit Katharine McCormick at her mansion in Santa Barbara. Strangers seeing them together on the street might have mistaken them for a pair of wealthy patrons of the arts. McCormick was still an imposing figure, tall and lavishly dressed, even if her fashion sense seemed to have frozen somewhere around 1930. Sanger was the shorter, lumpier of the two, a copper-haired, blunt-talking bundle of energy. The women spent much of their time discussing their health and diets. But inevitably the conversation also turned to sex.

In a letter written around the time of the meeting, McCormick said she was “
feeling pretty desperate
over the research end of our work.” In the past, Sanger had tried to persuade her wealthy friend to donate money to Planned Parenthood. But she wasn’t sure that was the best approach anymore.

As Sanger was preparing to leave for Asia, Pincus sent a report on his progress, describing in four single-spaced pages the experiments he and Chang had performed on rabbits and rats and explaining the effects of hormone injections versus administration by mouth. He confirmed that the oral doses were only 90 percent effective and said he hoped to experiment with different progesterone compounds that might work better.

“The foregoing experiments,” he concluded, “demonstrate unequivocally that it is possible to inhibit ovulation in the rabbit and successful breeding in the rat with progesterone. . . . It has been demonstrated furthermore that following the sterile period, normal reproduction may ensue.” The thing to do next, he said, was to
try more progesterone compounds
.

In response to his report, Pincus was grilled by Planned Parenthood’s national director, William Vogt, who wanted to know where Pincus’s work was going to lead: “In what specific ways,” Vogt wrote, “can you anticipate—if you will attempt such a projection—that the results of your research may be put to work? That is a shotgun question, but I believe valid, because a constant problem in most research is selling the idea of research itself, especially
to those who may help support it
.”

Pincus was getting drilled for answers after only a year of work and an investment, including funds from McCormick and Planned Parenthood, that had amounted to a mere $3,100 ($27,000 today). For 1952, he was expecting to receive $3,400. He wasn’t complaining, but he and Sanger both recognized that Planned Parenthood had not yet made a serious commitment. The organization’s leaders, Sanger told McCormick, “have
evidently not been sold
on the Pincus research.” She suggested to McCormick that they might have to take matters into their own hands.

Soon after, in June 1952, McCormick made plans to visit the Worcester Foundation to see firsthand what was happening there. She met Hoagland and Chang and learned about the progesterone work underway, but she did not see Pincus, who was out of town
on other business
.

One weekend that fall, Pincus and twenty-nine scientists from eighteen cities and twenty universities met at Arden House, a conference center in Harriman, New York, overlooking the Ramapo Valley. It took Pincus’s enormous influence to bring together such a distinguished group of biochemists, gynecologists, endocrinologists, immunologists, and sociologists, and to do it over a weekend, no less. But given that the meeting concerned a sensitive subject, it’s possible that the scientists preferred to do such work on weekends and away from their universities. No publicity was sought for the gathering, and the names of those assembled were omitted from the documents produced in the meetings. The objective of the assembly: to discuss the expansion of research and testing of fertility control.

In a report summarizing the discussions held during the meeting, the scientists agreed that most of the progress in birth-control research had been the accidental byproduct of other work. They also agreed that “safe, effective, inexpensive and aesthetically acceptable” oral contraceptives were well within reach—if only researchers would commit to their development. They went so far as to issue a resolution: