Lez Keep It Real

This week’s Notable Lesbian is:
Katharine Lee Bates
August 12, 1859 – March 28, 1929

Katharine Lee Bates is remembered as the author of the words to the anthem “America the Beautiful.” Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts. The daughter of a Congregational pastor, she graduated from Wellesley College in 1880 and for many years was a professor of English literature at Wellesley. While teaching there, she 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 for which she also studied. The first draft of “America the Beautiful” was hastily jotted in a notebook during the summer of 1893, which Bates spent teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Later she remembered:

“One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.”

The words to her one famous poem first appeared in print in The Congregationalist, a weekly journal, for Independence Day, 1895. The poem reached a wider audience when her revised version was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript, November 19, 1904. Her final expanded version was written in 1913.

Katharine Lee Bates died in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on March 28, 1929, aged 69. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.

Interesting tid bit:
Bates was a prolific author of many volumes of poetry, travel books, and children’s books. Her family home on Falmouth’s Main Street is preserved by the Falmouth Historical Society. There is also a street named in her honor, “Katharine Lee Bates Road” in Falmouth. She lived at Wellesley with Katharine Coman, who herself was a history and political economy teacher and founder of the Wellesley College Economics department. The pair lived together for twenty-five years until Coman’s death in 1915. These arrangements were sometimes called “Boston marriages” or “Wellesley marriages,” when two or more academic professionals lived together for companionship and financial benefits.

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More Notable Lesbians

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*Some information provided by Wikipedia.com

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