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Abstract
“The Scarab” (1907), a sprawling Shingle-style house in Wellesley, Massachusetts, was built by poet and professor Katharine Lee Bates as a home for herself and her partner Katharine Coman, a social economist and labor activist. Both women had lived and taught at Wellesley College, founded as a single-sex institution for higher education in 1870, for over a quarter of a century. In their new home they adapted many of its hybrid spaces for living and working, surrounding themselves with friends, family, colleagues, and students to form a lively and engaged community of women. While it decisively broke with familiar conventions in both plan and program, “The Scarab” nonetheless fits comfortably in its leafy, suburban neighborhood, demonstrating that this committed couple could “hide in plain sight” while radically queering the terms of early-twentieth-century domesticity.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to her colleague Professor Martha McNamara, Director of the New England Arts and Architecture Program at Wellesley College, for her help and support at every stage of this project, and to Katie Swenson, for her hospitality, architectural expertise, and dedicated stewardship of “The Scarab.” Ian Graham, Director of Library Collections, and Jane Callahan, College Archivist, were generous with their time and knowledge of the Wellesley College Archives. Thanks also to Naureen Mazumdar, Wellesley College Class of 2014, for helping to reconstruct the sequence of rooms, and for drawing the plans of “The Scarab.”
Notes
1 For the history of the women’s colleges and campuses see Horowitz (Citation1984).
2 For Wellesley's history see Palmieri (Citation1995, passim); see also Scudder (Citation1937), and Glasscock (Citation1975). For the history of the campus and its buildings see Fergusson et al. (Citation2000).
3 For Bates, see Burgess (Citation1952) (Burgess was Bates’s niece) and Balderson (Citation1971); for Coman, see Halsey (Citation1915), Allen F. Davis (Citation1971), and Scanlon and Costner (Citation1994). A new biography of Balch, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946, was published by Kristin Gwinn (Citation2010). The papers of Caroline Hazard (1871–1939) are in Special Collections at the University of Rhode Island. Further information on Scudder, Converse, and other members of the faculty is available from the Wellesley College Archives (WCA).
4 The phrase, which gained currency in the 1890s, was used as early as 1884: see also Palmieri (Citation1995); sheet music, Boston: White, Slaughter & Co. [Library of Congress]; Reese (Citation1906).
5 For an analysis of women’s friendships and romantic attachments in the nineteenth century, see Smith-Rosenberg (Citation1975). By focusing on the discursive norms, notions of gender identity, and conventions of social etiquette among middle-class men and women, Smith-Rosenberg moved the discussion of women’s same-sex relationships away from the (often fruitless) search for “proof” of sexual contact and concentrated instead on the depth of emotional, physical, and psychological attachments. See also Deegan (Citation1996). For a discussion of these issues in gay male culture, see Fellows (Citation2005: 13–14, 22) and Halperin (Citation2012).
6 The literature on this question is vast and inconclusive: see, among many other titles, Faderman (Citation1990) and Kennedy and Davis (Citation1993). For the backlash against “Boston marriages,” see Duggan (Citation1993).
7 Katharine Lee Bates (KLB) to Ellen Kendall, July 16, 1921, Elizabeth Kimball Kendall (EKK) papers, WCA, quoted by Palmieri (Citation1995: 314, note 29).
8 For lesbian patrons of architecture, see Bonnevier (Citation2005, Citation2007).
9 The house, which was demolished in 2006, was built for Raymond’s sister and her partner.
10 For Goetsch and Winckler, see Bandes (Citation1991).
11 The construction of the house was overseen by Bates’s brother Arthur Lee Bates, a prominent businessman in Portland, Maine.
12 For Davidson, see Leonard (Citation1907); for Brainerd, see Brainerd (2009: parts 4–7, 177).
13 For the Shingle style and the Colonial Revival in New England, see Truettner and Stein (Citation1999), and Conforti (Citation2001).
14 This detail, and the historical documents supporting its authenticity, were particularly noted by Davidson and Brainerd (Davidson Citation1904: 387, 389) in “The Imaginary House,” The House of the Seven Gables.
15 In an undated letter to her brother (probably September 10 and 12, 1907), Bates refers to “The Bower” and to her mother’s balcony: Bates’s own room and the one next to it are the only ones with access to this outdoor space. Characteristically, in the earlier letter, Bates writes that a friend had suggested that “Jeannie’s Room, The Blue Grotto” be named “Vanity Fair because of your long mirror.” Bates also notes that she was “to have a cedar chest for my room and call it Lebanon.” KLB to Arthur Bates, n.d. (probably September 10, 1907, WCA). I am grateful to Professor Melinda Ponder, who is preparing a biography of Bates, for calling my attention to these important letters from Bates to her brother. Bates made up nicknames for both people and things: she called her bicycle “Lucifer,” perhaps because Sigurd, the dog, was terrified of it (Burgess Citation1952: 123); and in the 1920s, she christened her Lincoln automobile “Abraham.” The car had been given to her by her friend Caroline Hazard, together with a paid chauffeur, when she became unable to walk long distances. In a note to her will, she suggests that this car be given to the chauffeur after her death: “Dear Mine Executors,” “In Bohemia, October 11, 1928,” WCA.
16 For Coman’s early practice of photography, see Bates (Citation1899); the reference to Miss Coman’s trunk, stored with supplies for the camera,” which was stolen and recovered during a trip to Spain, is on p. 55. Throughout her memoir, Coman's mother mentions the taking of photographs by both Seymour and Katharine Coman: see Coman (Citation1913: 99). In her memoir of their trip to Europe in 1895, she noted that Katharine “wished for a camera; it is a great disappointment to have missed bringing one” (Coman Citation1913: 128). This oversight was not repeated on later travels. Professor and social reformer Emily Balch published her photographs (together with others by Lewis Hine), see Balch (Citation1910). The book included photographs taken on a research trip in 1905–6. Professor Elizabeth Kimball Kendall, who had earlier (1894 and 1899) co-authored two books for high school students on English history with Coman, included her own photographs of China (taken in 1911) (see Kendall Citation1913).
17 In Bates’s memoir, she notes that Coman “nestled down with a thankful sigh into her own bed in her own Bohemia” (Bates Citation2006: 78).
18 Bates’s early life is well documented: in addition to the material found by Dorothy Burgess (1952: as in note 5); see also Anon. (Citation1896: 441–3); Guild (Citation1908: 261). For Katharine Coman, see Coman (Citation1913: ix–xvii, 1–56).
19 The earliest reading of this archive was by Judith Schwartz (Citation1979).
20 Her publications include The Industrial History of the United States (Coman Citation1910), drawn from her Wellesley course, Economic Beginnings of the Far West: How We Won the Land beyond the Mississippi (Coman Citation1912), and a treatise on unemployment insurance (Coman Citation1915), based on field research in Denmark and Norway.
21 She was also helped financially by a loan from her brother Arthur; both shared in the care of their mother and sister, who were to live with KLB at “The Scarab.” See KLB to Arthur Bates, n.d. (probably September 12, 1907), KLB Papers, WCA.
22 Bates and Scoville exchanged passionate love letters in the 1880s; these are marked by much soul-searching about the emotional (and perhaps also the physical) intensity of their relationship and by Bates’s fears about their future, very much in the manner that Smith-Rosenberg (Citation1975) described. In January 1888, for example, Bates wrote that she would gladly have exchanged vows with Scoville and embarked on what she calls a “Bohemian life,” but she insisted that Scoville would be happier in a marriage to a man: KLB to Annie Beecher Scoville, January 13, 1888, Series I, Box 20, Folder 790. Papers of Annie Beecher Scoville (1866–1953), Beecher Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
23 KLB to Katharine Coman, February 24, 1891, KLB Papers, WCA. The letter was first cited in Schwartz (Citation1979: 63).
24 KLB to Mary Russell Bartlett, January 3, 1910, KLB Papers, WCA.
25 For Bates’s dedication to Hawthorne, see Ponder (Citation1999).
26 See also Davidson (Citation1904: xi–xii), Introduction to The House of the Seven Gables. In Hawthorne’s text, George Edward Woodberry, whom Bates knew well, included a chapter on “The Chamber under the Eaves.”
27 See earlier, note 13.
28 Brainerd was married to Mary Bowen, a scholar of English and Italian Renaissance literature, who received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1897. Bowen resigned from her Wellesley post at the time of her wedding in 1906 (see Brainerd Citation2009).
29 Bates and her circle probably did not approve of preservationist Caroline Emmerton’s efforts to “restore” the Turner-Ingersoll House in Salem as a tourist-oriented “House of Seven Gables,” in 1907, but her scheme to use the proceeds from that venture to support a settlement house on the premises was ingenious (Conforti Citation2001: 248–62).
30 No biography of Brainerd exists: see note 13 earlier.
31 The volume includes examples of his work, i.e. the Bishop Cheverus School in East Boston, and the Daniels Grammar School in Malden, MA.
32 KLB to Arthur Bates, n.d. (probably September 11, 1907), KLB Papers, WCA.
33 KLB to Arthur Bates, n.d. (probably September 10, 1907), KLB Papers, WCA.
34 All of these objects were noted by Bates in a letter attached to her will: “Dear Mine Executors,” “In Bohemia, October 11, 1928,” KLB Papers, WCA.
35 Even Coman’s doctors were part of their extended feminist circle: they included Dr Eliza Mosher, an 1875 alumna of the University of Michigan and a reformer in the field of women’s health, and Dr Katharine Raymond, a 1905 graduate of the University of Michigan, Instructor of Hygiene and Wellesley’s resident physician.
36 KLB to Abbie Farwell Brown, 1926, Brown Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
37 Jane Addams to KLB, May 9, 1922, KLB Papers, WCA.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alice T. Friedman
Alice T. Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of the History of American Art at Wellesley College, where she has taught since 1979, and a Visiting Professor at the Modern Interiors Research Center at Kingston University. She is the author of many books and articles, including Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (Harry N. Abrams/Yale University Press, 1998, 2010) and American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (Yale University Press, 2010).