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Katharine Lee Bates — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Life and career

Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, to the town's Congregational minister William Bates and Cornelia Frances (Lee) Bates. Her father died a few weeks after she was born, and she was primarily raised by her mother and a literary aunt, both of whom had graduated from the all-women's Mount Holyoke Seminary. She attended Wellesley High School (then called Needham High School) in 1872 and then Newton High School until 1876. Bates entered Wellesley College, a women's college, as part of its second class in 1876. She graduated with a B.A. in 1880. She taught at Natick High School in 1880–81 and at Dana Hall School from 1881 until 1885.

In 1889, Bates's young adult novel Rose and Thorn won a prize awarded by the Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Society. It incorporated poor and working class women as characters to teach readers about social reform. She popularized the concept of Mrs. Claus in her poem "Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride" from the collection Sunshine and other Verses for Children (1889). The Mrs. Claus character is the chief organizer of Christmas Eve.

Bates used prize money from Rose and Thorn to travel to England and study at Oxford University in 1890–91. She then returned to Wellesley as an associate professor in 1891, earned her M.A. there, and was promoted to a full professor of English literature. Near the end of the Spanish–American War, she worked as a war correspondent for The New York Times, and strove to reduce widely-circulating negative stereotypes about Spaniards. She contributed regularly to periodicals (sometimes under the pseudonym James Lincoln), including The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Evening Transcript, Christian Century, Lippincott's, and The Delineator.

In 1900, she wrote Spanish Highways and Byways for The New York Times, a travelogue that not only described with beauty and precision the landscapes of a post-war Spain, but also made a commentary on the political and social panorama that she found once the war was over. Bates's style is distinct in that, if Spain is thought of as an orientalized East inside the West, then she applied the Oriental picturesquism concepts to Spanish models, which is a logical paradox. She uses this picturesque technique to depict not just the natural world and art, but also the subjects themselves.

In 1906, Bates and her brother, Arthur, signed a mortgage for a Wellesley houselot and house (now 70 Curve St.) to be built on it for the Bates family (Cornelia, Jeanne, and Katharine) and their tenants. Among the latter was Katharine Coman, who would eventually rent an attic bedroom and photographic darkroom. While the house was being built, Bates traveled to Egypt and the Holy Land with Wellesley College president Caroline Hazard. Upon returning to Wellesley, Bates named the house "The Scarab," after the sacred Egyptian insect she admired as "always climbing."

While working at Wellesley, Bates was elected a member of the newly-formed Pi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences because of her interest in history and politics. She retired from Wellesley in 1925 at the age of 66. In retirement, Bates continued to write and to publish poetry, and was in great demand as a writer and speaker.

Bates was also a social activist interested in the struggles of women, workers, people of color, tenement residents, immigrants, and poor people. She helped organize the Denison House, a college women's settlement house, with other women friends and colleagues in 1892. She wrote and spoke extensively about the need for social reform and was an avid advocate for the global peace movement that emerged after World War I. She was especially active in attempts to establish the League of Nations. Long an active Republican, Bates broke with the party to endorse Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis in 1924 because of Republican opposition to American participation in the League of Nations. She said: "Though born and bred in the Republican camp, I cannot bear their betrayal of Mr. Wilson and their rejection of the League of Nations, our one hope of peace on earth." Thinking of herself as a "global citizen," Bates decried the American policy of isolationism.

Bates died in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on March 28, 1929, aged 69, while listening to a friend read poetry to her. She is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery at Falmouth. Most of her papers are housed at the Wellesley College Archives and include "diaries, correspondences, musical scores, publications, scrapbooks, manuscripts, reports, memorials and tributes, memorabilia; concerning "America the Beautiful" and other writings of Katharine Lee Bates, her travels, and her life at Wellesley and in Falmouth, Mass."

Relationship with Katharine Coman

The nature of Bates's relationship with her Wellesley College faculty colleague, friend, occasional traveling companion, and "Scarab House" tenant Katharine Coman has been the subject of scholarly discussion for four decades. In her 2017 biography of Bates, Melinda M. Ponder describes Bates as an independent-minded social activist who set an example for women's intellectualism and independence in the late 1800s. Bates' adult diaries and surviving letters confirm Bates's warm friendships with several female peers, as well as her intense emotional involvement with, and delight in the companionship of, two men: Oscar Triggs, whom she met while at Oxford, and Theophilus Huntington Root, the brother of one of her Wellesley classmates. That said, the end of her courtship with Theophilus Root precipitated in Bates a period of suicidal depression. Bates never married. Had she done so, she would have lost her tenure-track Wellesley faculty position, as well as some of the independence she was accustomed to from her childhood in a woman-led household and subsequent life-course.

Bates destroyed most of the letters she and Coman had written to each other. One of the few to survive was written by Bates to Coman in 1893, just before she left Oxford to return to Wellesley: "You are always in my heart and in my longings... It was the living away from you that made, at first, the prospect of leaving Wellesley so heartachy ... and it seemed least of all possible when I had just found the long-desire way to your dearest heart." Ponder stresses Coman's importance to Bates in showing her how college professors like themselves could "challenge accepted attitudes towards women's social, economic, cultural, and gender roles". In her virtuosic corona of sonnets "In Bohemia," Bates celebrates the "vitality, adventurous spirit, and abiding spiritual presence of their love".

In earlier commentary, Judith Schwarz interpreted Bates's letters and poems to Coman as evidence of a lesbian relationship, citing as an example Bates's 1891 letter to Coman: "It was never very possible to leave Wellesley [for good], because so many love-anchors held me there, and it seemed least of all possible when I had just found the long-desired way to your dearest heart... Of course I want to come to you, very much as I want to come to Heaven." And in 1999, historian Lillian Faderman also concluded that the relationship between Bates and Coman was a "lesbian arrangement," including them among the other women faculty at Wellesley who paired off with each other. Other scholars contest the use of the term lesbian to describe what was characterized at the time as a "Boston marriage". Writes one: "We cannot say with certainty what sexual connotations these relationships conveyed. We do know that these relationships were deeply intellectual; they fostered verbal and physical expressions of love." Certainly, Bates long shared rental housing with various Wellesley faculty members, all of whom thereby economized while earning small salaries. Occasionally, she traveled with her long-time friend, Katharine Coman. And in 1910, when a colleague described "free-flying spinsters" as "fringe on the garment of life", Bates answered: "I always thought the fringe had the best of it. I don't think I mind not being woven in."

Bates's and Coman's connection is perhaps destined to be interpreted differently by different readers forever. The facts remain that Coman and Bates met at Wellesley by 1890 when the president of Wellesley College, Alice Freeman Palmer, determined to add women to the college's faculty. Coman served as a history and political economy professor, and founded the Wellesley College Economics Department. During her lifetime, Coman was nearly as well known as Bates. Both colleagues became influential independent women within their fields during their lifetimes; and Bates's work has continued to influence American life and literature to this day. In the days after Coman's death from breast cancer in 1915, Bates wrote a memorial to Coman, which is thought to be the first American narrative about breast cancer. Bates intended that the manuscript be privately circulated among the women's close circle of friends and family, writing on the title page: "For Katharine Coman's family and innermost circle of friends: Not for print nor in any way for general circulation." In 1922, Bates published Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance, a collection of poems she had addressed to Coman while alive or since her death. She dedicated the volume to Coman, referred to her as "my Friend [sic]", and included as a "Prefatory Note" a three-page biography of Coman largely focused on her career as an economist and historian, but written in a tone personal enough to allow a reference to her "vigorous and adventurous personality" and her "undaunted courage" in continuing to work during her final illness.