New Weekly Quest: The August 27th Birth Of Great Ladies This week we present the August 27th Birth Of Great Ladies. On this day, three great ladies were born:
- 1487 – Anna of Brandenburg, queen of Denmark
- 1669 – Anne Marie of Orléans, queen of Italy
- 1875 – Katharine McCormick, American women’s rights activist
Great things happened on this same day!
1487 – Anna of Brandenburg, queen of Denmark
Anna was the daughter of Johann Cicero, Elector of Brandenburg and Margarethe of Saxony. She was born in Berlin, Brandenburg, and died in Kiel, Holstein.
In 1500 she was betrothed to Frederick, then Duke of Schleswig and Holstein and, after her death, king of Denmark and Norway. Because they were second cousins (Frederick’s mother Dorothea of Brandenburg was the cousin of Anna’s father) their marriage required a Papal dispensation. In addition, the marriage was not held until 10 April 1502 due to Anna’s youth. The marriage, held in Stendal, was a double one: on the same day, Anna’s brother Joachim and Frederick’s niece Elisabeth were married.
Anna and Frederick had two children:
Christian III of Denmark (12 August 1503 – 1 January 1559)
Dorothea (1 August 1504 – 11 April 1547), married 1 July 1526 to Albert, Duke of Prussia
She died in 1514 at age 26. Her husband was remarried, to Sophie of Pomerania, and had six more children.
1669 – Anne Marie of Orléans, queen of Italy
Anne Marie d’Orléans (27 August 1669 – 26 August 1728) was the first Queen consort of Sardinia and the maternal grandmother of Louis XV of France. She is also an important figure in British history (see Jacobite Succession below). She was the daughter of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, younger brother of Louis XIV, and Princess Henrietta of England, the youngest daughter of Charles I of England. Her mother died at the Château de Saint-Cloud ten months after Anne Marie’s birth. A year later, her father married 21-year-old Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, who became very close to her stepdaughters. Her half-brother Philippe d’Orléans, the future Regent of France, was born of her father’s second marriage. Her stepmother later described her as one of the most amiable and virtuous of women.
To maintain French influence in the Italian states, her uncle King Louis XIV arranged her marriage, at the age of fifteen, to Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, then Duke of Savoy, later King of Sicily and then of Sardinia. The proxy marriage of Anne Marie and Víctor Amadeus took place at Versailles on 10 April 1684, the day after the signature of the marriage contract. Her husband-to-be was represented by her cousin, Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine. Louis XIV gave her a dowry of 900,000 livres. The Duke of Orléans accompanied his daughter as far as Juvisy-sur-Orge (18 kilometers south of Paris), and the comtesse de Lillebonne accompanied her all the way to Savoy. She met her husband Victor at Chambéry on 6 May, the nuptials being performed at the castle by the Archbishop of Grenoble. Two days later, the newlyweds made their “Joyous Entry” into Turin.
The first of the eight children she bore was Marie-Adélaïde, whose birth nearly cost Anne Marie her life, prompting administration of the viaticum. Marie-Adélaïde married Louis, Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis XIV in 1697, and was the mother of Louis XV. But both she and her husband died before he could succeed to the throne. This marriage was arranged with the assistance of the maréchal de Tessé and of Jeanne Baptiste d’Albert de Luynes, comtesse de Verrué, who was Victor’s mistress from 1689 till 1700. Her husband had two children with Jeanne. Nonetheless, when he fell ill with smallpox, Anne Marie nursed him until his recovery. At the death of her father in June 1701, her half-brother became the new Duke of Orléans. On 2 November 1701, her third daughter, Maria Luisa, then barely thirteen years old, married Philippe de France, duc d’Anjou, who had just become King Philip V of Spain. The young princess would become Regent of Spain while her husband was away campaigning in Italy.
Despite his marriage ties to France, Victor Amadeus joined the anti-French side in the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1706, Turin was besieged by French forces under the command of Anne Marie’s half-brother Philippe d’Orléans, and Spanish forces of her cousin and son-in-law Philip V. She and her sons Victor Amadeus and Carlo Emanuele were forced to flee the city. When the war was ended in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht, Victor Amadeus received the Kingdom of Sicily, formerly a Spanish possession. Anne Marie’s stepmother, Madame, the Duchess of Orléans, wrote: I shall neither gain nor lose by the peace, but one thing I shall enjoy is to see our Duchess of Savoy become a queen, because I love her as though she were my own child… He was forced to exchange Sicily for the less important domain of Sardinia in 1720, but retained the title of King. As the Savoyard consort, Anne-Marie had the use of the Royal Palace of Turin, the vast Palazzina di caccia di Stupinigi outside the capital, and the Vigna di Madama Reale. Queen Anne-Marie died of heart failure at her villa on 26 August 1728, the day before her 59th birthday. She is buried at the Basilica of Superga in Turin, where all her children, except Marie-Adélaïde and Maria Luisa, are also buried.
Her husband, Víctor Amadeus II, abdicated in favour of his son in 1730, and died two years later in Moncalieri, after having remarried morganatically. From 1714 to 1720, Anne Marie d’Orléans was the heiress presumptive to the Jacobite claim to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland. These claims were held at the time by James Francis Edward Stuart (“the Old Pretender”, son of James II). Ann Marie became heiress presumptive with the death of James’ sister Queen Anne in 1714. She was displaced as heir by the birth of the Old Pretender’s son, Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”), on 31 December 1720. Charles Edward and his brother Henry, Cardinal Stuart, both died without legitimate issue, so the descendants of Anne Marie d’Orléans inherited the Jacobite claim, i.e. they would have inherited the British crown had it not been for the Act of Settlement, which excluded the claims of the catholic Stuarts and d’Orléans’ and settled the throne on the nearest protestant relatives, the Hanoverians.
1875 – Katharine McCormick, American women’s rights activist
atharine 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. Katherine Dexter was born August 27, 1875 in Dexter, Michigan, in her grandparents’ mansion, Gordon Hall, and grew up in Chicago where her father, Wirt Dexter, was a prominent lawyer. 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. Four years later, her brother Samuel died of meningitis at age 25. In 1904 McCormick became the second woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first woman to receive a science degree from MIT, a BSc with major in biology. She planned to attend medical school, but chose to marry Stanley McCormick, youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, an heir to the International Harvester fortune. They married on September 15, 1904. In September 1905, they moved into a home in Brookline, Massachusetts. The couple did not have any children.
For over a decade, since graduating cum laude from Princeton University in 1895 where he had also been a gifted athlete on the varsity tennis team, Stanley had been showing signs of progressively worsening mental illness. In September 1906, he was hospitalized for over a year at McLean Hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia. In June 1908, Stanley was moved to the McCormick’s Riven Rock estate in Montecito, California where Stanley’s schizophrenic older sister, Mary Virginia, had lived from 1898-1904 before being placed in a Huntsville, Alabama sanitarium. While there, he was examined by the prominent German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin and diagnosed with the catatonic form of dementia praecox. In 1909, Stanley was declared legally incompetent and his guardianship split between Katharine and the McCormick family. In 1909 McCormick spoke at the first outdoor rally for woman suffrage in Massachusetts. She became vice president and treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and funded the association’s publication the Woman’s Journal. McCormick organized much of Carrie Chapman Catt’s efforts to gain ratification for the Nineteenth Amendment. While working with Catt, she met other social activists, including Mary Dennett and Margaret Sanger. In 1920 McCormick became the vice president of the League of Women Voters.
Throughout the 1920s McCormick worked with Sanger on birth control issues, McCormick smuggled diaphragms from Europe to New York City for Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau, and in 1927 she hosted a reception of delegates attending the 1927 World Population Conference at her home in Geneva. In that year McCormick also turned to the science of endocrinology to aid her husband, believing that a defective adrenal gland caused his schizophrenia. She established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School, and subsidized the publication of the journal Endocrinology. Katharine’s mother Josephine died on November 16, 1937 at age 91 leaving Katharine an estate of more than 10 million dollars. Stanley died on January 19, 1947 at age 72 leaving an estate of over 35 million dollars to Katharine. She spent five years settling his estate, most of which went to pay inheritance taxes. In 1953 McCormick met with Gregory Goodwin Pincus. Pincus had been working on developing a hormonal birth control method since 1951. McCormick agreed to fund Pincus research into oral contraception and she and Pincus persuaded Dr. John Rock to conduct human trials. 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. McCormick had provided almost the entire $2 million it took to develop and test the oral contraceptive pill. She continued to fund birth control research through the 1960s. While MIT was always coeducational it could only provide housing to about fifty female students. Therefore, many of the women who attended MIT had to be local residents. However, the place of women at the Institute was far from secure as Katharine Dexter told Dorothy Weeks (a physicist and mathematician who earned her master’s and doctorate from MIT) that she had lived “in a cold fear that suddenly–unexpectedly–Tech might exclude women…”.
In order to provide female students a permanent place at MIT, she would donate the money to found Stanley McCormick Hall, an all female dormitory that would allow MIT to house 200 female students. The ramifications of the hall are best stated by William Hecht ’61, executive vice president of the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT when he said, “the visible presence of women at MIT helped open up the science and engineering professions to a large part of the population that before had been excluded. It demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that at MIT men and women are equal.” Following her death in 1967, aged 92, her will provided $5 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which funded the Katharine Dexter McCormick Library in New York City, and $1 million to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. Katharine McCormick is a character in T.C. Boyle’s novel Riven Rock (1998), which is mainly about her husband Stanley’s mental illness. She was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 2000.
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