A Boston Tech Co-Ed
In 1896, 20-year-old Katharine enrolled at MIT (commonly called Boston Tech) as a part-time special student. She took courses in biology and chemistry for three years until she was able to pass the entrance examination and matriculate as a degree-seeking student. She majored in course VII (biology) and received her degree in 1904, with a thesis titled “On Cardiac Fatigue in the Reptilian Heart.”
Based on the course registers from her time at MIT and a collection of her student notes in MIT’s archives, we know that Katharine took a wide range of courses with a particular focus on biology and chemistry. Course notes show her work as a special student focusing on biology and chemistry prerequisites before branching out to courses such as climatology and dynamical geology. After matriculation as a regular student, Katharine also took courses in English literature, air thermometry, plant physiology, political economy, physics, embryology, and business law.
Katharine would have typically been the only woman in a classroom. During her time at MIT, there were 44 women students at the Institute total, and about 1200 male students. The class of 1904 also included five other women who received degrees in courses IV and V (architecture and chemistry, respectively). Katharine was the only woman to graduate that year with a biology degree.
Armond Field’s biography Katharine Dexter McCormick: Pioneer for Women’s Rights provides many interesting stories without citations. A beloved story from that biography, about the photo above, alleges that prior to Katharine’s arrival at MIT, women students were under a strict dress code and had to wear hats in class. However, MIT has never had a dress code, and photographs of women students from the 1800s and early 1900s do not show them wearing hats in any classroom.
Katharine’s essays also show her humor and flair for writing which would carry her through her suffrage work. In an essay titled “My Preparation for the MIT,” she writes of MIT “How scientific it was in all ways, even to proclaiming the doctrine of Evolution by permitting the survival of only the fittest of its students…I had heard of its almost insurmountable difficulties. It was described to me how they confronted the pale student on entering and how they pursued him as he grew paler and yet more pale through the death march of four years. It was said that, should he live to finish his course and behold his degree, he stood a physical and mental wreck on the threshold of Rogers building…I again asked myself should I not be the one to accomplish this?” Oct 4 1899
