Many of us may hear “America the Beautiful” played this July 4th. But did you know that its author, Katharine Lee Bates, was also a scholar, suffragist, and social activist, and lived for 25 years in a loving relationship with fellow professor Katharine Coman?
The two Katharines met as professors at Wellesley College (Bates in English and Coman in economics), and eventually shared several residences, including a house they planned and had built together. In 1891, while on a trip to study at Oxford University, Bates wrote to Coman:
Do you remember the sunset sky that Sunday evening, when we strayed home from the Rock and there were two hands in one pocket? … For I am coming back to you, my Dearest, whether I come back to Wellesley or not. You are always in my heart and in my longings. I’ve been so homesick for you on this side of the ocean and yet so still and happy in the memory and consciousness of you. 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-desired way to your dearest heart…. Of course I want to come to you, very much as I want to come to Heaven.
(Cited by Judith Schwarz in “‘Yellow Clover’: Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1979), p. 63.)
In another poem (also cited by Schwartz), Bates writes to Coman of the pain she felt when they “who love so dearly” disagreed, “for we cling one soul together.”
Coman left fewer writings than Coman, but when she was dying of breast cancer, she wrote to Bates, “My only real concern to remain in this body is to spare you pain and grief and loneliness.”
And Bates wrote in a volume of poems upon Coman’s death in 1915:
My love, my love, if you could come once more
From your high place,
I would not question you for heavenly lore,
But, silent, take the comfort of your face.
…
One touch of you were worth a thousand
creeds.
My wound is numb
Through toil-pressed day, but all night long
it bleeds
In aching dreams, and still you cannot come.
When Coman died, she left some bequests for other family and friends, but “the bulk of her small estate’s possessions went to Bates,” Schwartz related.
Biographer Melinda Ponder, in Katharine Lee Bates: From Sea to Shining Sea, notes that Bates also had two male suitors, prior to Coman, and that Coman helped Bates end her relationship with one of them. Coman was the person with whom she chose to live her life.
Clearly, the two women used language that (even allowing for the flowery style of the era) spoke of a loving, committed relationship, deeper than either of them had with anyone else. “Lesbian,” “bisexual,” or “queer” were not terms they ever used for themselves, and we don’t know if their relationship was sexual, but it had some physical element to it, as Bates’ “two hands in one pocket” comment above indicates. In her book In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley, Patricia Ann Palmieri calls the late 19th- and early 20th-century Wellesley faculty “a community of women-committed women, because this approach acknowledges the elements of love, physical affection, and openly sexual behavior in some Wellesley marriages and reserves the term lesbian for women who have consciously claimed that identity.”
As Schwartz observed, however, “It is of much less historical importance to pin an air-tight label on the sexuality of women involved in female partnerships than it is to discover and analyze how these women lived their lives outside of the standard comforts and socially approved protection of a male-female relationship.” Bates and Coman are our queer foremothers, even if they used different words to describe their relationship.
Bates’ legacy is more than just her relationship with Coman, of course, even to us queer folk. She was an activist and reformer, a teacher and writer. She advocated for world peace and the League of Nations and she and Coman helped organize a settlement house for immigrants and college women in Boston. Coman, for her part, was also a social welfare activist and was friends with settlement activist, reformer, and social worker Jane Addams.
Interestingly, journalist (and fellow Wellesley alumna) Lynn Sherr noted in a 2012 New York Times piece that Bates was “born and bred a Republican, but in 1924 her presidential vote went to John W. Davis, the candidate who supported the League of Nations, which she saw as ‘our one hope of peace on earth.’ Davis was a Democrat.” Perhaps Bates can also be an icon for those similarly disillusioned with the Republican party today.
And as much as Bates sang the country’s praises in “America the Beautiful,” she also asked (in the less-known second verse) that “God mend thine every flaw.” She saw the country’s imperfections as well as its possibilities. In all her facets, she was a woman whose life and accomplishments deserve to be better known today.
In a 2019 piece for NPR, Eric Westervelt said, “If ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ boldly proclaims the country’s greatness as fact, ‘America the Beautiful’ is more aspirational. Bates is not asking whether the flag has survived an artillery strike. Rather, this young feminist poet, who had just emerged from a deep depression, is asking if the nation, and perhaps the world, can ever live up to its high ideals.”
Today, that question is more pressing than ever.
Note 1: Like Bates, I am also a Wellesley alumna; I lived two years in the dorm that bears her name. At the start and end of each academic year and at Reunion, Wellesley students and alums gather on the chapel steps to sing college songs, including “America the Beautiful.” When we get to the last line, we change Bates’ “crown thy good with brotherhood” to “crown thy good with sisterhood,” or more recently, “siblinghood,” belting out the new word with extra volume. Bates, for all her forward-thinking work for women’s rights, was still a product of her time (and an English teacher) and used the then-correct masculine form of the collective noun. I’d like to think, though, that she’d be happy with our updates.
Note 2: There is one recent picture book of Bates’ life that mentions her relationship with Coman: For Spacious Skies: Katharine Lee Bates and the Inspiration for “America the Beautiful,” by Nancy Churnin and illustrated by Olga Baumert (Albert Whitman). It notes that they shared a home, but says only that theirs was “a close companionship.” That feels less than satisfactory, but those wishing to share Bates’ story with their children (and perhaps to make it clear that the women loved each other) may still wish to check it out.