Katharine Coman

• Katharine Coman
• Born: November 23, 1857
• Died: January 11, 1915

Social reformer and economist, was born in Newark, Ohio, the fourth of seven children and the eldest daughter of Levi Parsons Coman, a teacher, storekeeper, and lawyer, and Martha (Seymour) Coman. Both parents were born in the East and both were well educated, and they gave their children, daughters as well as sons, solid educations. After Levi Coman returned from the Civil War, in which he had served as a volunteer, the family moved to a farm near Hanover, Ohio. Katharine attended the Steubenville Female Seminary in Steubenville, Ohio, and the high school of the University of Michigan, then entered the university, from which she received a Ph.B. in 1880.

In the fall of 1880 Coman became an instructor of rhetoric at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She taught history from 1883 to 1900, when, at her instigation, a department of economics was opened. She was professor of economics and sociology from 1900 until her retirement in 1913.

Coman was an effective and inspiring teacher, but her concern with social and economic issues extended beyond the classroom. She was never a major leader in social-reform work, but her intellect and energy made her an important member of the expanding network of women reformers that included several of her colleagues on the Wellesley faculty and many other graduates of women’s colleges.

In 1884 Coman sponsored a chapter of the Young Women’s Christian Association at Wellesley, and in 1890 she helped organize a club for young working women in Boston. An early supporter of the College Settlements Association, she chaired its Boston Settlement Committee, which in 1892 founded Denison House, one of the earliest settlements and a center for labor organizing. Coman was president of the electoral board and chairman of the standing committee of the national College Settlements Association from 1900 to 1907, and she was instrumental in creating the program that awarded fellowships to college graduates for residencies at settlement houses, opening the way for many young women to enter social work.

Coman served on the executive committee of the Massachussetts Consumers League from 1899 to 1905. During the garment workers’ strike of 1910-11 she was active in the Women’s Trade Union League of Chicago, bringing the strikers’ grievances to the attention of the public. Sympathetic to socialism, she worked for the National Progressive Service division of the Progressive party after her retirement from teaching in 1913. The following year she toured England, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden studying old-age and unemployment-insurance programs. Her Unemployment Insurance: A Summary of European Systems was issued posthumously in 1915.

Coman was the coauthor of The Growth of the English Nation (1894) and A History of England for High Schools and Academies (1899) and the author of History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian Islands (1903), the textbook The Industrial History History of the United States (1905), and Economic Beginnings of the Far West (1912). With the poet Katharine Lee Bates, the author of “America the Beautiful” and a fellow Wellesley professor with whom she lived for many years, Coman edited English History Told by English Poets (1902).

Coman died of cancer at the age of fifty-seven. She was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wellesley established the Katharine Coman Professorship of Industrial History in her honor in 1921.

Some autobiographical material appears in Memories of Martha Seymour Coman (1913), of which Katharine Coman was the editor. The best biographical source is the article in Notable American Women (1971). Also useful are F. Converse, Wellesley College (1939), and A. P. Hackett, Wellesley: Part of the American Story (1949). K. L. Bates, Yellow Clover (1922), is a memorial book of poems. See also the obituaries in Survey, January 23, 1915 and in The New York Times, January 12, 1915.