[1] Following the early death of her father of a heart attack at age 57 when she was 14 years old, she and her mother Josephine moved to Boston in 1890.

[1] Dexter passed entrance exams to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1896, but was required to take three years of prerequisite classes to enroll.

Stanley graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 1895 where he had also been a gifted athlete on the varsity tennis team.

[4] In June 1908, Stanley was moved to the McCormicks' Riven Rock estate in Montecito, California, where his schizophrenic older sister, Mary Virginia, had lived from 1898 to 1904 before being placed in a Huntsville, Alabama, sanitarium.

Katharine met Sanger in 1917, and later that year joined the Committee of 100, a group of women who practiced promoting the legalization of birth control.

[6] She scheduled meetings with major European diaphragm manufacturers in cities such as Rome and Paris, and used her language skills and biology background to pose as a French or German scientist and place large orders for the devices.

They were shipped to her family chateau, Prangins Castle, outside Geneva, where they were sewn into the linings of fashionable coats and other garments.

She smuggled them past U.S. customs agents in New York, having successfully disguised them as the spoils of extravagant European shopping sprees for high-end fashions.

She made these trips every summer from 1922 to 1925, retiring only after the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake forced her to redirect her attention to rebuilding her husband's estate and devote her energy to helping direct his care.

In that year McCormick also turned to the science of endocrinology to aid her husband, believing that a defective adrenal gland caused his schizophrenia.

Believing that Stanley's illness was a defective adrenal gland, and could be treated with hormone treatment, she established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation from 1927 to 1947 at Harvard Medical School, and subsidized the publication of the journal Endocrinology.

Pincus had been working on developing a hormonal birth control method since 1951 and his own research laboratory, the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology.

[7] The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale of the Pill in 1957 for menstrual disorders and added contraception to its indications in 1960.

[10] After the successful development and approval of the contraceptive pill, Katharine yielded her attention to the lack of housing for women at MIT.

Sharing vice president duties with fellow philanthropist and art collector Wright S. Ludington, McCormick served on the Museum's Buildings Committee and was responsible for the hiring of the renowned Chicago architect, David Adler, to convert the old post office into the art museum.