Tracing her family tree back to the 1400s, with relatives who sailed for the colonies in 1635, Katie knew she came from a long line of people who moved others with their words. They were poets, lecturers, ministers, and letter writers, a community of ancestors from which to draw inspiration. Though she didn’t know it yet, she would join this flock of Lees and Bateses as a woman of letters, aware of her “glimmering crew of dear and queer ancestral ghosts.”[2] It was, in fact, what Katharine Lee Bates was born to do: to bring poetry into the world.
They say that when a mother gives birth, her new baby is her baby. When another child comes along, that baby becomes the baby, and the older child is moved up the line to the position of older sibling. Except for the youngest child. They always stay the baby in the eyes of their mother. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons older children feel their youngest sibling gets away with murder? (Also, by the time the youngest child comes along, mama is tired.)
Katie was the baby, always and forever. While her older siblings were doing chores and off trying to earn money to keep their family afloat, Katie was writing in little notebooks, reading under a lilac tree, and playing with her best friend, Hattie. And yes, her mama was tired. Cornelia was exhausted growing vegetables on her small plot in the ground, caring for her children, and sewing for other women in Falmouth. “Where is rest to be found in this weary world?” she wrote to a friend. “I am growing a good deal in sympathy with the poor woman, who, when she was asked what was her idea of Heaven, said, ‘to be able to put on a clean apron and sit down.’ ”[3]
Cornelia’s older son, Arthur, helped keep the family in slightly less dire straits—he harvested cranberries and trapped muskrats, he caught herring and sold it to fishermen for bait, he hunted to put food on the table. The weight of being the family caretaker bore down heavily on the young boy, even though his mother did her best to prevent it.
The sea roared around the Bateses in its constant refrain. The ocean was the white noise of sleep, the warm breeze of summer, the icy spray of winter’s chill. It was also the ever-present anxiety of fishermen setting off for a day’s work, and the agony of those whose loved ones didn’t return. Katie immortalized their town of Falmouth in her notebooks:
Never was there lovelier town
Than our Falmouth by the sea.
Tender curves of sky look down
On her grace of knoll and lea…
The poem goes on to reference the
Happy bell of Paul Revere,
Sounding o’er such blest demesne[4]
The Congregationalist church Katie’s father left behind was the first in Falmouth, and it’s still an active congregation. It’s a quintessentially New England meetinghouse, right out of a picture postcard: white, with a steeple. And in the steeple rings a bell forged by the one and only Paul Revere. You probably know him as a silversmith working in Boston when the American Revolution was in its infancy. And he was that. But he was more. Paul Revere was a dentist. But also he made gunpowder. Paul Revere was a goldsmith. But also he engraved bookplates. Paul Revere had sixteen children with two different women. But also only five of them outlived him. Paul Revere was a freemason. But also a spy. Paul Revere rode to Lexington and Concord one night in April. But also he made bells.
For all the things one could learn about Paul Revere, he rode a horse and shouted at people is perhaps one of the least interesting. Revere wasn’t even the only one who rode a horse to warn troops in the distance that the British were coming. A teenage girl did it, too, and she rode twice as far, in the rain. She got a personal thanks from George Washington. But Sybil Ludington didn’t have a famous poem written about her, so hers is not the name we remember.[5]
Paul Revere was the son of a Huguenot who left France because of religious persecution. His father, Apollos Rivoire, landed in the colonies, alone, at age thirteen. He decided to Anglicize his name to Paul Revere, a moniker he later bestowed upon his son. Revere the elder was a goldsmith and a silversmith, a profession he taught to Revere the younger.[6]
Had Paul been born the second son, he might have gone on to college. But he was the oldest boy, and when his father died too young, it was his duty to carry on his father’s business. He became excellent at his craft, during a time when nearly all silver buckles and tea sets were bespoke and afforded only to the wealthy. This allowed Revere to move about the upper echelons of society in ways other tradesmen could not—he was more than just a man who worked with his hands. He was an artisan, and he earned a modest but comfortable living for his growing family.
Revere started forging bells late in life, after his storied career as a dentist/silversmith/spy/midnight rider. In early America, to obtain a bell for your church or school usually meant sending away for it and taking delivery many months later, the instrument voyaging across the sea from England.
The bell in Paul’s own church community had cracked, and he offered to try to fix it. It’s apparently quite the endeavor, making bells. One can’t just pour some metal in a mold and call it good.
For starters, bells are heavy. The largest of Revere’s bells weighed over two thousand pounds, but the one he made atop Katie’s home church weighed around eight hundred.[7] The bell has to be able to support its own weight, withstand extreme temperature swings, and handle being struck. Most importantly, bells have to sound right. Imagine hitting another hunk of metal with a hammer: A railcar? Your stove? It would sound like a bang, not like a substantial, resonant tone that covered the surrounding village in sound waves. A bell needs to sound like a bell, not cannon fire.
Paul Revere’s bell in Falmouth, Massachusetts, was cast in 1796. The church still possesses the original receipt, written in Revere’s handwriting. It says they paid $338.94. The bell waits for its cue, its chance to ring out the Sunday meeting, as it’s done for more than two hundred years. It rang on the day of Katie’s father’s funeral in 1859, and again when the women of the congregation draped their mourning shawls over the windows after Abraham Lincoln was shot. The outside of the bell reads, “The living to the church I call, and to the grave I summon all.”[8]
—
Katie was a bespectacled girl who grew into a bespectacled woman. Portraits of her make Katie seem serious and stern, when, in fact, there was never a dull moment in her company. When a peddler stopped by her home to offer his wares, Katie tried a pair of glasses, and to her astonishment, she could see. “There are leaves on the trees!” she exclaimed. One of her friends said that her glasses seemed to stay perched on her face as if “by a miracle.”[9]
From the time she was a young child, Katie was pondering life’s existential questions, like “Why do boys get to play outside and girls have to stay in and sew?” Her hatred of sewing was a recurring theme in her life. What she wanted was to learn. Book learning. She wrote that her fondest wish was to be able to read and write and go to school as much as she wanted. “I would study and study. I would know what makes the beautiful colors all around you, dear old setting sun, and I would learn all about the nations on the other side of the globe you are going to shine on now…. I would study and study and study and know and know and know.”[10]
Her intelligent childhood mind didn’t quit. “So the great question of women’s rights has arisen,” she wrote in 1866. “I like women better than men. I like fat women better than lean ones…. Girls are a very necessary part of creation. They are full as necessary as boys. Sewing is always expected of girls. Why not of boys.”[11]
In her diary, she wrote out a will, divvying her possessions should anything untoward occur. She gave her friend Hattie some things, her sister some others, and she concluded the will by saying: “To my schoolmates, I give and bequeath my love, and urge them to remember the words ‘life is uncertain.’ ”[12]
And it was.
Cornelia eventually moved her children away from Falmouth on Cape Cod to what would later become Wellesley in central Massachusetts, to help her ailing sister. As Katie grew, everyone could see that her bright mind needed something more than a life of stitching. She wanted to attend college.
Women in the 1800s were prohibited from enrolling in many universities in the United States, but small groups of dedicated people changed that. They set out to create a system of women’s seminaries and colleges, the original of which are referred to as the Seven Sisters. These were highly selective institutions with admission requirements very similar to those of all-male universities like Harvard.
Wellesley, a Seven Sisters school first chartered in 1870, had a sprawling and luxurious campus perched on a pastoral piece of former farmland. Katie was admitted to one of the first classes of attendees. Her favorite part of campus was the library, which she described as a gem, “arranged in alcoves and superbly finished throughout in solid black walnut…with cozy nooks and corners…sunny windows, some of them thrown out into deep bays; with galleries, reached by winding stairs.”[13] It was regarded by many as one of the finest buildings in America at the time. The founders, Pauline and Henry Durant, spent a million dollars building the campus.[14]
Henry Durant expected women who graduated from Wellesley to be fully on par with graduates of Harvard and Yale, and his watchwords were, “Aspiration! Adventure! Experiment! Expansion! Follow the gleam!”[15]
Women’s health was poorly understood at the time, and it was a common belief among men that pursuing too much education made a woman unfit for childbearing, as it diverted too great a blood supply to the brain and away from reproductive organs. Durant refuted this, arguing that a proper education strengthens the body and mind.
One of his goals was to produce a generation of female scholars who could fill the gaps left by the 750,000-plus men killed during the Civil War. To that end, Wellesley would be the only college in the nation that would have an all-female faculty, which was no small feat, given how few colleges awarded degrees to women who might become professors.
Durant was religious and required attendees to practice daily Christian devotions. Wellesley, he said, would embody “the revolt which is the real meaning of the Higher Education of Women. We revolt against the slavery in which women are held by the customs of society—the broken health, the aimless lives, the subordinate position, the helpless dependence, the dishonesties and shams of so-called education. The Higher Education of Women is one of the great world battle-cries for freedom; for right against might.”[16]
Katie loved to write, and Wellesley loved her for it. She was elected class president and earned the nickname “Katie of ’80,” a title she held for the rest of her life. Her work began to be published regularly, including in prestigious periodicals like The Atlantic, which started to actively champion the writings of women. She was enamored with the work of the world-famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and through her connections at The Atlantic, made his acquaintance. He told her that he had seen her poem in the magazine and liked it.[17]
Longfellow believed that to flourish as a nation, America needed its own writers. Its own literary tradition, those who knew the crests of the Atlantic’s waves on the stark landscape of New England, those who knew the beat of liberty that kept time in the chests of Americans. Longfellow’s work, including enduring pieces like “The Song of Hiawatha” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” spoke to this uniquely American perspective.
And, of course, he wrote “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”
Perhaps Katie took Longfellow’s compliment to mean that she had what he had: the courage and vision to become a great American poet, whose work wasn’t just about America, but for America.
Like all women of the time, Katie’s life choices were constrained by societal norms and expectations about what kinds of jobs were acceptable for women to hold. She turned to the profession of many millions of women before her: that of teacher. She didn’t particularly enjoy the “suffocating atmosphere of a winter schoolroom,”[18] but she was delighted when Henry Durant offered her a position at the new Dana Hall School, the official prep school for girls who wanted to attend Wellesley College.
She continued writing, and she made a purposeful decision to center women in her poems and stories. She made famous the concept of Mrs. Claus in “A Story of Christmas Eve,” and she told the editor of the Boston Evening Transcript that her wish was that American writers would be able to portray American women as they really were: “The Yankee smartness, the quick tact and intuition, the dry humor and love of fun, the restless, eager curiosity, the spirited independence, the sparkle and gleam that play over the surface of earnestness and energy, thoughtfulness and devoutness, passion and intensity.”[19]
A new genre of literature was emerging in this time period, which for the first time began to treat childhood as a special period of life. Following in the footsteps of Louisa May Alcott and other New England writers, Katie continued to grow her body of literary work for both children and adults, and the publications she appeared in allowed her to reach tens of thousands of readers. Though her work was published next to Walt Whitman’s in prestigious periodicals, she knew she would never make money unless her writing could be published in books.
