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Young Lady from London

Katherine Jackson and her sister Mamie Jackson Catching were hired as teachers at a mission school in Laredo, Texas, from 1895 to 1896.¹ “We are all very sorry to see Miss Kittie leave,” mourned the Mountain Echo, “as she is one of the most pleasant and amiable of London’s young ladies and will be greatly missed by all.”² At that time, a college degree was not needed to teach public school. Jackson took advantage of that, relocating to Texas, and acquiring a year’s worth of experience as a teacher. While home in London in March and June 1895, she prepared for college with tutors. This preparation proved effective; her academic record card indicates that she passed out of all her freshmen and sophomore courses when she entered Ohio Wesleyan University in 1897.³

It was not the norm for women to attend college in the 1890s, but it should be noted that at that time few men attended college either. In 1890, college attendance nationwide was 3 percent of the US population overall, and 20 percent of college attendees (0.6 percent of the overall population) were women.⁴ As there was little in the way of serious advanced study available to women at southern colleges, many southern women turned to northern schools for their education. The historian Rebecca Montgomery argues: “The lack of colleges in the South was an attempt to keep women in traditional roles. Instead, it propelled the brightest and best of Southern women into the seedbed of Women’s Rights and Progressive Movements.”⁵ This is, correct in effect, correct, but the causes are more complex.

By 1900, 2.8 percent of southern women attended college. While actually a much higher percentage than the overall figure for women nationwide, this is still quite a low. There were a number of reasons for this. For one thing, the pool of southern students from financially secure backgrounds was somewhat limited. According to Peter Temin, after the Civil War the American South faced three insurmountable financial problems: a reduced demand for cotton, the loss of slave labor, and the physical destruction left by the war. The cost of college tuition was out of reach for many families in the postbellum years. Further, while women’s colleges did exist in the South (Decatur Female Seminary, e.g., was founded in 1889), the curricula of most such schools tended toward grooming students for the traditional role of genteel woman and wife rather than for professional or academic life. This may have been a continuation of conservative southern cultural momentum or perhaps nostalgia for a social order that had come crashing down with the end of the war.⁶

For that minority desiring a serious education, few colleges in the South offered bachelor’s degrees in rigorous academic programs to women. The only remaining choice for those seeking such degrees was to go north. Katherine Jackson made that choice.⁷

The best of the southern preparatory schools for women (including Science Hill) had special relationships with and groomed their students for the Seven Sisters: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard Colleges.⁸ Jackson, however, chose to attend Ohio Wesleyan University, passing its stringent entrance requirements in all subjects, including English, Greek, Roman and medieval history, mathematics, antiquities, natural sciences, and Latin.⁹

While not one of the Seven Sisters, Ohio Wesleyan was one of the earliest institutions of higher education in the country to educate women. Coeducation itself was in Jackson’s time a fairly recent innovation. As a result, the hostility of male undergraduates toward coeds was fairly widespread across the country. Roger Geiger notes that on many campuses women were resented, ostracized, and ridiculed, and Pamela Roby holds that this hostility was spurred in part by the fact that women with college degrees were marrying and having children at a lower rate than their noneducated counterparts, fueling racist hysteria about the engulfment of the white race by immigrants from Italy and Ireland and people of other undesirable ethnicities. This hysteria was soon to fuel anti-immigration laws, racially motivated violence, and a one-sided reinterpretation of the mountain people of Appalachia that played into one of the major endeavors of Jackson’s life.¹⁰

Jackson attended Ohio Wesleyan only from 1897 to 1898, according to her student record card. She graduated in one year and nine months.¹¹ Nevertheless, a great deal is revealed about her from her time at the university. For one thing, she rejected the idea of a limited collegiate role for women. Instead of taking just the “ladies’” literary track course of study, she completed that track plus extra course work and earned a bachelor’s, completing the more rigorous “classical” course of study. She was not the only woman to do so. One-third of the graduates pursuing the classical track were women. Jackson even went beyond what was required for that track, taking three semesters of music courses that did not count toward either degree. This indicates a high personal motivation to better her music skills and knowledge, which were to come in handy within the next decade or so.¹²

Second, there is evidence that she thought outside the box. In March 1898, the senior women issued The Senior Girl’s Edition of The Transcript, for which Jackson served as business manager. It was not customary for women to work on college newspapers at that time (though at Ohio Wesleyan a few served in minor roles). This exclusion may have served to inculcate in the Ohio Wesleyan women a desire to seek outside validation. In a rebellious gesture, and in the kind of decision that might have come from an organization’s business manager, the editors sent a copy of The Senior Girl’s Edition to the apparently more open-minded DePauw University Palladium. Their bold move was rewarded. A critique from the Palladium reads: “It is ably edited and typographically perfect.”¹³

Third, Jackson was a leader. Organizations with which she was involved suggest the kind of limitless energy she brought to organizing and executing her endeavors. The year that she was named vice president of Ohio Wesleyan’s YWCA group, the university paper reported that the group had grown “in interest and influence as well as numbers” since the previous year and praised its “high standards of organization.”¹⁴ Other issues of the school paper mention personal qualities that would help her achieve her ambitious aims: vigor, energy, interest, influence, organization, and an enterprising nature.

Fourth, Jackson achieved success and recognition quickly. Though she had been at Ohio Wesleyan for not even two years, she was called on to take part in the dedication of the Slocum Library in the spring of 1898. She presented the key to the library to the junior class on behalf of the senior class and made a presentation speech. The College Transcript notes the twenty-two-year-old’s ability to conduct research, write, deliver a speech, move an audience, and even touch on a momentous event with appropriate humor. It states: “[Jackson] completely captured her audience, showing vast research and an observing eye. The rendering was characterized throughout by great smoothness. She told of our appreciation of the slow-come library, to [sic] late to aid us in our finished knowledge. ‘On the top round of our glory we look back and consider ’99 to be next worthy and most needy of the prize.’”¹⁵

Fifth, Jackson’s intelligence is evidenced by her academic record. The classical track was demanding. Compared to the “ladies’” literary track, it required more hours in difficult core subjects (like languages, sciences, sociology, and philosophy) and more difficult course work within each subject. Jackson did extremely well. Not only did she, as we have seen, pass out of her freshman and sophomore years, but her grades were invariably high.¹⁶

Sixth, her work in and experiences with English and music would serve her to great advantage ten years later when Jackson assumed the mantle of ballad collector. As part of her course of study, she had three semesters of English philology and five semesters of music classes (and was credited with two semesters before her arrival, indicating a prior level of advanced competence). In addition, Monnett House, where she lived, had a banjo club. Banjo clubs were a passing fad on college campuses at the time, but the presence of one at Monnett House is of particular interest given Jackson’s later encounter with the instrument in the backcountry.¹⁷

Seventh, Jackson threw herself fully into any activity with which she was associated. Much of her extracurricular effort during the spring of 1898 focused on Class Day. In March, she had been appointed one of three students (and the only woman) to serve on a committee to organize a series of events during commencement week. To be trusted with so prominent an activity within only one and a half years speaks to her drive and determination and to the impression she must have made on her professors.¹⁸

Eighth, she had a sense of humor, which was on display when she spoke at the Class Day ceremony. “Miss Jackson told how the girls sneaked out of Monett and went to the dedication of the Slocum Library,” reported the Transcript with tongue firmly in cheek, “and the only regret is that it cost the faculty $20,000.”¹⁹

Finally, while from the upper crust of London, Kentucky, Jackson was not particularly well-off compared to her peers, and she seemingly had a reputation for caring little about social mores and material wealth. A jesting and ironic prophecy in the College Transcript at the time of her graduation reads: “And so as we go out into the world in later years we shall expect to hear … Katherine Jackson became suddenly rich, and has given herself up to a fashionable life.”²⁰

In April 1898, Jackson’s mother came to visit. Jackson’s father was taken ill around this time and had only eight months left to live, so this may have been the visit when Maria came to tell her daughter the awful news. It does not seem to have slowed Jackson down. She continued to take part in normal college activities. She took tea with friends. She played tennis. She went on an excursion to a “picknick” at “Magneetic Springs” with a male friend and a group of students. Whether because of or in spite of her father’s illness, she appeared determined to soak in every moment of college life that she could.²¹

It is not known whether Jackson’s parents made the trip to her graduation ceremony, though, owing to William’s declining health, it is not likely they did. Her sister Adelaide did travel to Ohio and was there to see Katherine Jackson receive her bachelor of arts degree in June 1898.

Jackson taught in Alabama the fall of 1898 and then spent some of the winter at home and the rest with her sister Addie in Georgia. Both Addie and Katherine came home in late December of that year to be with their dying father. William H. Jackson, who had meant so much to the town of London, died of stomach cancer on January 2, 1899. In an undated article, “JCM” avows: “The writer has never seen one endure such suffering with so much patience and resignation as Brother Jackson.” JCM also discloses: “By close attention to his own business [he] amassed a considerable competence.” He characterized Jackson’s life as “blameless” and asserts: “[Jackson] called his wife and children about him and bade them an affectionate farewell, reminding them of the joyous reunion in store for them.” He refers to “the largest crowd seen at a funeral for many years” and recounts that Jackson, an active Freemason, was buried by the chapter that he helped found.²²

After their father’s passing, Katherine and Adelaide Jackson returned to Bailey Station, Georgia. Katherine then went back to teaching in Alabama, but later that year she commenced her studies for a master’s degree at Ohio Wesleyan University.²³

The university had no residence requirement for a master’s degree, and Jackson apparently lived at home while working on hers. In fact, of the eighteen graduate students that year, only three were in residence.²⁴ It usually took at least a year to complete the degree, “depending on the amount and quality of the work done [rather] than upon the time spent in residence.”²⁵

Still living in London, Jackson continued to engage in social events popular among young women of her time and class. In July, she attended the International Epworth League in Indianapolis, and, finding time for recreation, she went on a foxhunt in December.²⁶

The Jackson Family: Siblings Lou Jackson Eberlein, John Jackson, Mayme Jackson Catching, Moriah Louise McKee Jackson (mother), Adelaide Jackson, Annie Jackson Pollard, Robert Jackson, Katherine Jackson. Courtesy of Kay Tolbert Buckland.

No grades or work are accessible from Jackson’s master’s studies at Ohio Wesleyan, but, in 1900, four out of thirteen master’s degrees were awarded to women. And one of those women was Katherine Jackson.²⁷ She completed her work in one year and attended the commencement ceremony in June 1900, although she had been present on campus so infrequently that the school paper listed her as “one of the visiting alumni.”²⁸ She received her degree either at that ceremony or later that year.²⁹

True North

After obtaining her master’s degree, Jackson was offered a full scholarship at Yale University in 1900–1901 but elected instead to teach English and history at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, which she did from 1900 to 1902.³⁰ She then made the highly unorthodox decision to pursue a doctorate and, in the fall of 1902, headed north to New York City.³¹

Jackson attended Columbia University from 1902 to 1905 as a student in the “School of Philosophy, part of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,” a little more than fifteen years after the first doctorate was earned by a woman at the college. The preface to her dissertation records that she studied in “the departments of English and Comparative Literature.” While attending Columbia, she lived on West 123rd Street, just down the hill from the campus and across from the newly designed Morningside Park. She listed London as her permanent address, indicating that she still considered Kentucky home.³²

One can only imagine what it must have been like for the young woman from Kentucky to find herself in the middle of bustling New York City in 1902 and at a large university like Columbia. First of all, the fact that she was a southern woman attending college made her part of a minority demographic. As we have seen, in 1900, less than 3 percent of southern women attended college. In general, women constituted a minority of the student population at virtually all colleges. For example, at Bryn Mawr in 1910, only 5–8 percent of the students were women; women made up an even smaller percentage of the student body at Holyoke.³³

Jackson would also have been considered to be a southerner. And, apparently, she self-identified as such, as evidenced by her application for a Southern Fellowship in 1904. Though Kentucky officially fought for the Union (in reality, it was split and spent the war in civil turmoil) and was thought of as part of the West rather than the South until after the Civil War, by the 1890s it had been clearly recast in the minds of nonsouthern Americans as a slaveholding, southern state. Also, as mentioned, Jackson belonged to a family that prided itself on being descended from the first Virginia settlers. Joan Marie Johnson contends that southerners worked to retain their identities while attending northern schools. Surrounded by people with different views and values, and perceiving a need to defend their heritage, they often formed clubs based on their common background. This was especially true for students from border states. It is not clear whether Jackson attempted to shed her roots while in New York or whether she looked to hang on to them. Later in life, she kept close to her hometown of London, returning yearly, and continued to embrace the Kentucky part of her identify. While there is no evidence that she was a member of any sort of southern club, it is possible that she might have been involved in some such formal or informal organization, given her social skills, class, background, and propensity both to join and to lead.³⁴

There is another issue to consider as well. At family gatherings, there is often an unwanted relative, a guest who is ugly and rude and obscene and vile. His presence is dreaded, his absence longed for, and, when he is gone, we prefer not to think about him. In the American family, that guest is race.

The question of race must have been ever present at Columbia during Jackson’s time there, just as it was everywhere and still is. Laws suppressing the rights of African Americans were rising with alarming rapidity in the South. Precursors to the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan were stirring. Two to three African Americans were lynched every week in the South during this time period in horrible and hideous ways and in carnival atmospheres.³⁵ The faux science of eugenics was in its heyday in academic circles, with scientists putting their racist theories into practice through the forced castration of African Americans, immigrants, and “undesirable” poor whites.³⁶ Millions of southern African Americans (and poor whites) were trapped in the poverty of the sharecropper’s life. When we consider that the students at Columbia were largely the grandsons of Union soldiers, we must assume that questions about race and slavery were faced by southerners at the university on a daily basis.

Many southerners still fostered deep prejudice against African Americans.³⁷ The ever-progressive Columbia University admitted black students in small numbers by Jackson’s time, so friction or at least strained relationships were inevitable.³⁸ In addition, Jackson lived just north of Columbia in Harlem, which was predominantly white at the time, but African Americans were starting to move in in large numbers. Jackson undoubtedly had neighbors in New York who looked a lot like her servants back home. While in her dissertation she praised antislavery writers, there is no record of how she felt about her African American neighbors and fellow students in New York. Living in Harlem must have involved some adjustment on her part, to say the least. She had grown up in an atmosphere in which bigotry against African Americans was accepted. Racist violence had occurred regularly in London during her childhood. The local newspaper reported on and condemned some of these acts but treated others (like a nighttime visit from the Ku Klux Klan to a black woman) as though they were funny.³⁹

In addition, there were few female graduate students at Columbia at the time—and so far only one woman had earned a doctorate—so the social cohort available to her would have been limited.⁴⁰ She was acquainted with women at Barnard College, however, including some in administration. A recommendation letter from the dean of Barnard states that she was “prominent and influential in the graduate student body” and that she “was a woman of executive power.”⁴¹ There is no record that Jackson sought companionship outside the college.

Jackson pressed ahead diligently with her doctoral studies. One of her professors, W. P. Trent, had suggested that colonial literature in Pennsylvania was, at the time, a largely unexamined topic, so she chose this subject for her doctoral dissertation.⁴²

At 163 pages, her dissertation is the most extensive single piece of writing we have by Jackson. From it, we learn quite a few things, not only about her subject, but also about her own personality: confident, swift spoken, intelligent, curious, divergent thinking, capable of sharp humor, focused, tolerant but firm in her faith, and persistent. She praises Francis Daniel Pastorius for his 1688 opposition to slavery and admires early Philadelphia for the “variety of peoples and liberality of doctrine”; it is a place “where a man might belong to any or no sect, and yet be regarded as a good citizen.” Speaking of the poet James Ralph, she remarks dryly: “Ralph was one of the race of editors whose morals are not to be dwelled upon.” She writes admiringly of Benjamin Franklin, calling him “far-sighted, sensible and fearless,” and discusses his beliefs without condemnation and with outright respect. Conversely, she labels Paine’s The Age of Reason “an attack upon revealed religion, filled with coarse and vituperative illustrations and written in a wholly irreverent spirit, which gained the author exceeding unpopularity in England and America.”⁴³

The dissertation gives a good sample of Jackson’s writing style. It displays long sentences that are spun out in an almost sermon-like and poetic manner. Jackson is quite conscious of the rhythm and sound of her words. Her writing is high-toned and passionate. She approaches her subject with authority and certainty. This is a style that she displayed throughout her academic career.

Finally, the scope of the work itself provides a final clue to Jackson’s powers of perseverance. This was a prodigious undertaking. She has nine pages of sources listed in her bibliography, roughly totaling two hundred sources. Her primary sources came from many different locations, including New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Ohio, and New Jersey. In 1905, travel to archives required a significant investment of time and money. Such an effort exemplified great determination, focus, energy, and resourcefulness on Jackson’s part.

Dr. Katherine Jackson French. Courtesy of Kay Tolbert Buckland.

Jackson completed her dissertation in 1905. Though her name was listed in the June 1906 commencement program, she was awarded her degree (with an English major and a comparative literature minor) on February 13, 1906.⁴⁴

Consider the enormity of this statement: Katherine Jackson was awarded her PhD from Columbia University in 1906. In 1900, three years before Jackson commenced work on her degree, only 204 women in all of the United States held doctorates, 6 percent of a total of 4,000 overall. Moreover, Jackson was, according to her obituary, the first woman from south of the Mason-Dixon Line to earn a doctorate from Columbia University, only the second to do so in the history of the college, and one of the first Kentucky women to earn such a degree from any “standard university.” For this achievement alone, she should be accorded a degree of respectful notoriety. When we add her role as one of the first major ballad collectors in the United States, a century’s worth of disinterest in her becomes all the more puzzling.⁴⁵

There are possible reasons for the lack of contemporary attention in her home state. For one thing, in 1906, an academically accomplished woman would not necessarily have been deemed admirable by the press or the general public. Then, there is the matter of the southerner (or westerner) “gone north” (or “east”) for her education, again, something that might not have been perceived in a positive way. After the Civil War, resentment of the North grew in Kentucky, which was torn in two by the conflict to begin with; it is unclear whether Jackson’s accomplishments were accepted or resented by the people of London. To complicate matters, after receiving her doctorate, Jackson taught for one year at Bryn Mawr and three at Mount Holyoke, thus completing the Science Hill/Seven Sisters connection, not as a student, but as something more exalted—a faculty member, a full-fledged part of the perpetuation of great northern institutions. During that time, she studied briefly at Yale, the ultimate symbol of elite northern academe. This leads to the question of “getting above her raising,” another possible source of friction. Finally, she had been formerly known in London as a nice young woman of good breeding, one who had often been praised for displaying socially acceptable feminine virtues in what passed for the local paper’s society column. A doctorate from an Ivy League college probably did not fit that comfortable and socially acceptable feminine image. Whatever the reason, Jackson’s academic accomplishments did not garner praise, in her hometown or elsewhere. In fact, she received more attention in London four years earlier when she attended the Grand Hop wearing pink chiffon and diamonds.⁴⁶

Ballad Seeds

Jackson’s ballad-collecting interest began in her New York years. In addition to her studies in English while at Columbia, Katherine took courses in Spanish literature, which included Spanish and Moorish balladry. In her notes, she writes that the ballad “is a dead form … can’t expect it to yield literary influence.”⁴⁷ She was also quite taken with El Cid, noting that more ballads had been written about him than any other Spanish figure, some going back as far as 1612. Her interest in balladry was thus already budding when, in 1905, a group of her friends told her they had heard a lecture about uncollected ballads in the hills of Kentucky given by two “instructors” from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Jackson was familiar with Berea. In fact, when she was seven, her family took her there for a visit, during which she caught a cold severe enough to bear mention in the local paper. Perhaps it was that the lecturers were from Berea, or perhaps it was simply the unexpected encounter with a bit of home while so far away, but the subject of Kentucky mountain music caught her attention then and there, in the middle of New York City. “They talked of the many ballads in the mountains of Kentucky, which no one had collected. A nursemaid had taught us Barbara Ellen but no other. I determined to investigate at my first free moment,” she later wrote. In this way, she was moved to undertake a grand expedition, adventuring into the hills of eastern Kentucky when she returned home few years later.⁴⁸

After she earned her doctorate, Jackson returned to London in June 1905 and gave a party for her friends in August. She returned home again briefly in July 1907 while she was teaching up north. She also engaged in some postgraduate work at Yale University from 1907 to 1908.⁴⁹

In 1909, Jackson obtained a leave from her position at Bryn Mawr to work on a textbook on Old English. She used some of that time to return home to tend her ailing mother. Maria must have recovered because, in the fall, Jackson’s journeys into the mountains surrounding London to collect the ballads of Kentucky began. These trips, the resulting collection, the five-year quest to publish it, and the question of Jackson’s “stolen thunder” will be examined in part 2.⁵⁰