Life and Career
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, which she had also studied.
Bates was a prolific author of many volumes of poetry, travel books, and children's books. She popularized Mrs. Claus in her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride from the collection Sunshine and other Verses for Children (1889).
She contributed regularly to periodicals, sometimes under the pseudonym James Lincoln, including Atlantic Monthly, Congregationalist, Boston Evening Transcript, Christian Century, Contemporary Verse, Lippincott's and Delineator.
A lifelong, active Republican, Bates broke with the party to endorse Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis in 1924 because of Republican opposition to American participation in the League of Nations.
Bates never married. In 1910, when a colleague described "free-flying spinsters" as "fringe on the garment of life", Bates answered: "I always thought the fringe had the best of it. I don't think I mind not being woven in."
Bates died in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on March 28, 1929, aged 69, and is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery at Falmouth.
Read more about this topic: Katharine Lee Bates
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