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This episode of American Innovations contains some sexual content

and is not suitable for everyone. Please be advised.

It's May 1923, and a passenger ship is pulling in to New York Bay.

An elegant middle-aged woman stands on the deck, anxiously gazing at the approaching shore.

Her name is Catherine Dexter McCormick, and she's one of the wealthiest women in America.

She's also a crusader for women's rights and Margaret Sanger's closest collaborator.

McCormick has spent the last four months overseas, a shopping trip she has told French customs

for the latest European fashions, which was true technically.

But it wasn't hats and dresses she was after.

McCormick was in the market for something much more illicit, diaphragms.

Hundreds of little dome-shaped silicone cups for Sanger's new birth control clinic in New York City.

It had been seven years since Sanger's Brownsville clinic was rated by the police,

and a lot had changed in that time.

For one, American women had won the right to vote,

but contraceptives were still illegal in the United States.

The only place to buy them was Europe.

So McCormick traveled to France.

There, she met with manufacturers, placed massive orders,

and had the devices shipped to her private chateau in Geneva, Switzerland.

She then hired local seamstresses to discreetly sew the diaphragms one by one

...