Stone Gardens: Early feminist writer and biographer from Logan County found final resting place in Gaylordsville, Connecticut
- Dennis McCaslin
- Mar 8
- 2 min read
Katharine Susan Anthony was born on November 27 1877 in Roseville (Logan County)
She was the third of four children of Ernest Augustus Anthony and Susan Jane Cathey. Her father worked as a grocer and later as a police officer. The family lived in Roseville for her first six years.
When the local economy declined they moved first to Paris still in Logan County and then to Fort Smith. Anthony attended public schools in Fort Smith. She taught elementary school in the same district and lived with her parents. This arrangement let her save money for further study.
She spent a year at universities in Freiburg and Heidelberg in Germany. In 1905 she earned a bachelor of philosophy degree from the University of Chicago. In 1907 she left Arkansas to teach at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She soon moved to Greenwich Village in New York City.
There she started her writing career and stayed for more than fifty five years. Her first book Mothers Who Must Earn appeared in 1914 and examined the conditions faced by working women and children. The next year she published Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia.
Her biographies of historical women followed. Margaret Fuller A Psychological Biography came in 1920. Catherine the Great appeared in 1925 and Queen Elizabeth in 1929. Both sold more than one hundred thousand copies each.
Later books covered Marie Antoinette Louisa May Alcott Charles and Mary Lamb Dolly Madison Mercy Otis Warren and her distant relative Susan B. Anthony. Anthony applied psychological insight to these subjects and presented them as complex individuals rather than symbols.
She never married. She shared a long partnership with educator Elisabeth Irwin the founder of the Little Red School House. Together they raised several adopted children. The two women kept a summer home in Gaylordsville Connecticut. Anthony died on November 20 1965 in New York City two weeks after a heart attack.
She was eighty seven.
She was buried in Morningside Cemetery in Gaylordsville alongside Elisabeth Irwin. Her nine biographies and earlier studies on labor and feminism remain part of the record on women in history. The works shifted how later writers approached the personal dimensions of public lives.
The family that left Roseville with her as a child saw one member produce a body of work that reached readers across decades.
