Katharine Lee Bates is best known as the author of “America the Beautiful”—but she was also a scholar, suffragist, and social activist, and lived for 25 years with fellow professor Katharine Coman. This picture book illuminates her life and the inspiration for her most famous work.
The Picture Book
The book begins with Bates’ childhood in Falmouth, Massachusetts, during the American Civil War, when “The country’s heart was ripped in two.” From an early age, we learn, she saw the unfairness of traditional gender expectations, and immersed herself in books and writing rather than thinking about boys and marriage. She studied hard to earn a place at Wellesley College, a then-new college for women (also my alma mater), where students were taught “they could do anything men could do.”
In the outside world, however, Bates still noticed injustice between women and men, rich and poor. She wanted to help. After graduating, she became a professor of English, but also “spoke up for women’s suffrage and world peace,” helped establish a settlement house that provided social services to immigrants and college women in Boston, and wrote a book about sweatshop workers struggling to care for their children.
In 1893, she traveled by train from Boston to Colorado to teach a summer class, and admired the beauty of the country even as she also saw ongoing economic disparities. These thoughts, and a trip to the top of Pikes Peak, inspired her most famous poem, which was published two years later and set to music in 1910 by Samuel A. Ward. It was, author Nancy Churnin says, “a poem that sewed the dreams of a diverse nation together.”
Many wrote her thank-you letters for the poem. She answered every one, Churnin tells us, and “served coffee and cake to visitors who came to the home she shared with Katharine Coman, another professor at Wellesley.” We see an image of the two women sitting at a table together, reading and answering letters.
Bates and Coman did indeed live together for 25 years, including in a house they planned and had built together. Yet this simple, single statement about them sharing a home feels like it downplays the deep relationship the women had. Bates once wrote to Coman, ” 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.” Granted, the book isn’t about their relationship; had Bates married a man, he might have warranted only a line in a short picture book that focused on Bates’s accomplishments in the wider world. In an Author’s Note at the end, however, Churnin adds that:
Katharine had a close companionship with another professor at Wellesley, Katharine Coman, for twenty-five years. After Coman’s death in 1915, Katharine dedicated a book of poems to Coman called Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance.
That’s true enough—yet something about the term “close companionship” bothers me. It’s too similar to the term “longtime companion” that has so often been used as a euphemism for same-sex partners (particularly in obituaries during the AIDS crisis). “Close and loving relationship” would have been, I think, no less accurate and perhaps even more reflective of the actual language that Bates used, without the euphemistic overtones (which Churnin may not even have intended).
Still, For Spacious Skies acknowledges that the two women shared a home and had a close connection. That’s more than most people know about the author of “America the Beautiful.” Adult readers might, however, want to make clear to young ones that the two women also loved each other. Add it to your collection of queer biographies (but don’t just read it during Pride Month—it’s a year-round American tale).
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. And as much as she sang the country’s praises in “America the Beautiful,” she also asked (in the 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—and Churnin deserves praise for helping young readers learn more about her. Baumert’s illustrations enhance the narration, evoking American folk art while also capturing the richly saturated colors of the landscapes that inspired Bates.
As a final note, I’ll share that at the start and end of each academic year and at Reunion, Wellesley students and alums gather on the chapel steps to sing various college songs, including “America the Beautiful.” When we get to the last line, we change Bates’s original “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.
