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. A new picture book illuminates her life and the inspiration for her most famous work.
The Picture Book
For Spacious Skies: Katharine Lee Bates and the Inspiration for “America the Beautiful,” by Nancy Churnin and illustrated by Olga Baumert (Albert Whitman), 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 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, 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.
The Two Katharines
Let’s take a little excursus here, leaving the picture book for a moment. Bates and Coman lived together for 25 years. They shared several residences in that time, including a house they planned and had built together. Once, while on a trip to study at Oxford University, Bates wrote to Coman, “You are always in my heart and in my longings… 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.” (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, an economics professor, 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:
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.
Clearly, they lived and formed a life together and 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” might not be terms they ever used for themselves, but as Schwartz observed, “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.” Even the National Park Service acknowledges:
Cohabitation and close relationships among women were not uncommon in the 1800s. They are sometimes called “Boston marriages.” They allowed women to support each other and pursue career ambitions without being legally, socially, or financially constrained by marriage to a man. Some of these relationships were probably platonic friendships, while others were physically intimate. We cannot know the exact nature of Bates’s and Coman’s partnership, but it was clearly loving and central to their lives.
And of course, there are degrees between “platonic friendships” and “physically intimate” relationships. Two people can be romantic without being physically intimate, for example. A relationship “loving and central to their lives” is enough for me to claim the Katharines as our queer foremothers, no matter the words they used to describe their relationship or the degree of physical intimacy.
Back to the Book
In the body of For Spacious Skies, Churnin speaks of their relationship only in the one line above about them sharing a home. Granted, the book isn’t about their relationship; had she 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 update.