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
