page_title: Katharine Coman
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Katharine Coman / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: Photographic portrait of Katharine Lee Bates, author of "America the Beautiful". Image believed to be in Public Domain.
context_page_description: Katharine Ellis Coman was an American historian, economist, sociologist, educator, and social activist. Coman worked at Wellesley College for 35 years as an instructor, professor, and dean. Believing that the field of political economy could be harnessed to solve the pressing social problems of the day, Coman created new courses in the discipline. She specialized in research and teaching about the development of the American West, and British and American industrialism. In her work, she criticized capitalism and supported the labor movement. She wrote the first history of American industry as well as the first paper published in The American Economic Review. She was the first female statistics professor in the US and the only woman co-founder of the American Economics Association. Throughout her life, she traveled widely to conduct her economics research. A social activist, Coman supported the settlement movement and the labor movement. She shared a home with poet Katharine Lee Bates for 25 years, and the two women often traveled together. Coman died of breast cancer in 1915. Wellesley College created the Katharine Coman Professorship of Industrial History in her honor.
context_section_description: For 25 years, Coman lived in a "Boston marriage" with Wellesley professor and poet Katharine Lee Bates, the author of "America the Beautiful". Such partnerships were so common among Wellesley faculty that they were called "Wellesley marriages". Coman and Bates shared a house they named "the Scarab" with Bates' mother, Cornelia, and her sister, Jeannie. The women reportedly enjoyed life together as family. Coman frequently traveled for her research on economic history; she visited Europe, the American West, Scandinavia, and Egypt. Bates accompanied her on many of these trips. Some scholars believe the two women were a lesbian couple.
caption: Katharine Lee Bates, author of the words to "America the Beautiful"
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