page_title: Katharine Lee Bates
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Katharine Lee Bates / Life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Statue of American educator and author Katharine Lee Bates ("America the Beautiful") outside of the Falmouth Public Library in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
context_page_description: Katharine Lee Bates was a prolific American writer, college professor, scholar, and social activist. Although she published volumes of poetry, travel books, essays, children's books, books for young adults, and editions of many earlier writers' works, today Bates is primarily remembered as the author of "America the Beautiful". While on the Wellesley College faculty, Bates mentored many young poets and helped establish American literature as a field for college study by creating an early course on the genre and writing a textbook for the field. Some late 20th-century scholars have asserted that Bates was a lesbian who lived for 25 years with long-time friend and companion Katharine Coman. Biographer Melinda M. Ponder has presented conflicting evidence and reached a different conclusion.
context_section_description: Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts to the town's Congregational minister William Bates and Cornelia Frances Lee. 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.
  Taking advantage of new educational opportunities available to women after the Civil War, 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, The Congregationalist, Boston Evening Transcript, Christian Century, Contemporary Verse, Lippincott's, and The Delineator.
  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, 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; conc
caption: Statue of Katharine Lee Bates at the Falmouth Public Library in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
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