Joan Marie Johnson, PhD
Lecturer
Northeastern University
Joan Marie Johnson’s project, Funding Research for the Birth Control Pill: Katherine Dexter McCormick, Feminism, and Women's Health, will research the papers of John C. Rock (as well as Walter B. Cannon, Loretta McLaughlin, and others) to uncover the story of a woman's contribution to the advancement of reproductive medicine. Katherine McCormick, one of the first female graduates of MIT, was a philanthropist and early advocate for birth control, who ultimately funded the research conducted by John Rock and Gregory Pincus that produced the first birth control pill in the 1950s.
Dr. Johnson writes, "This research will explore how McCormick's own scientific background influenced her interest in funding medical research as a strategy for obtaining better birth control methods. McCormick was in a unique position to enable researchers to conduct controversial medical research because of the independence that her wealth provided and her belief in the power of medical science to improve women's rights. She had the scientific knowledge necessary to understand the details of the research and kept in constant contact with Pincus and Rock."
Dr. Johnson received her Ph.D. in American history from UCLA in 1997. She teaches American Women’s history and Southern history at Northeastern Illinois University. She is the author of Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges: Feminist Values and Social Activism, 1875-1915 (2008), Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1898-1930 (2004), and the editor and author of the introduction to Southern Women at Vassar: The Poppenheim Family Letters, 1882-1916 (2002). She has published articles on Southern women, race, reform, and education, and is the co-editor of a three volume historical anthology on South Carolina women, South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times. Johnson is the co-founder and co-director of the Newberry Seminar on Women and Gender at the Newberry Library in Chicago.