astro
July 23, 2002, 6:32pm
1
Slightly ironic and interesting factoid. Now you know.
From Salon
The writer went on to trace the history of our best-known patriotic traditions, rituals, sayings and songs, from the Pledge of Allegiance to the motto on the Statue of Liberty to “America the Beautiful,” noting that the latter was written in 1883 by Katherine Lee Bates, a feminist professor of English at Wellesley who lived “for decades” with “her life partner Katherine Coman, an economist and social historian. It’s unlikely that those who sing the stirring words ‘and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea’ know that a progressive lesbian who agitated for a more democratic America authored these words.” In other words, the writer was saying, the story of the country is a continuing story, and it starts again when you lift your eyes from the paper.
Playwright Katherine Lee Bates -bio
For many people in the United States, the song “America the Beautiful” captures the spirit of the country even better than the national anthem. It certainly is a lot easier to sing. On top of that, the lyrics were written by Katharine Lee Bates, a Wellesley College professor who lived for 25 years as “one soul together” with another woman.
Munch
July 23, 2002, 7:06pm
2
That’s odd - your double apostrophes (a/k/a “the quote”) are different inside your codes.
Are you transferring your text from a notepad or a word document?
astro
July 23, 2002, 7:13pm
3
Yes. I wondered what the hell happened. The coding seemed right. Thanks for the explanation.
Don’t use the fancy (aka real) quotation marks in the vBcode tags, use the straight quotation marks (aka inch marks.)
astro
July 24, 2002, 1:02am
5
Thanks for the fix. Per the bio link I imagine the relationship described below is about as “out” as anyone was going to get in their time period.
In 1887, Bates met another young faculty member, Katharine Coman, who taught history and political economy and later founded the college’s economics department. Their friendship grew slowly; it wasn’t until 1890 that the two women considered themselves (and were considered by others) to be bound together in an intimate relationship. Their circle of friends included other female academic couples who lived together in “Wellesley marriages.”
Because the salary for a female professor was only $400 a year “with board and washing,” Bates and Coman supplemented their incomes by writing books and articles, giving guest lectures, and accepting summer teaching gigs. Throughout their relationship, work often kept the two apart. Bates’s travels sometimes took her abroad, once to Spain, where she wrote to Coman, “Such a rainy, sorrowful day. I want you very much.” On a research stint at Oxford University, she reminisced about an afternoon they’d shared when “there were two hands in one pocket.”