In June of 1906, MHS student Katherine Brown invited 10 of her closest friends up to her house at 286 West Emerson Street to let them in on a secret. She was engaged to be married, and her fiancé was their English teacher, J. Thatcher Sears.
No one was surprised. Everybody knew they had been a pair since the start of Katherine’s junior year, and that their classroom relationship had been bolstered by time spent together in their church’s youth group. They were married a year later in the bride’s backyard, with the full support of her parents, their pastor, and over 100 friends and family. As one newspaper account put it, their relationship was “generally accepted by their many friends as the most natural thing in the world.”
Why was a relationship that would today be considered criminal thought of as “natural” in 1906?
For about 300 years. the age of first marriage in New England had remained consistent: early twenties for women, mid-twenties for men. Katherine and Thatcher married when she was 20 and he was 26, which was within the socially expected age range.
While their relationship had begun when Katherine was too young for marriage, Thatcher had bided his time through a long, public courtship, which made their eventual union all the more respectable.
The relationship satisfied marriage ideals both old and new. Thatcher was a Harvard graduate, and Katherine was the daughter of a bank clerk, so they were compatible by traditional standards of social class. In contrast, their initial relationship as student and teacher appealed to the modern, romantic ideal of love as an improbable union of opposites.
Most importantly, however, almost all marriages in 1906 were based on explicit legal and social inequality, such that the jarring power imbalance between Katherine and Thatcher would have struck most of their contemporaries as normal, if not desirable. As Katherine herself put it, “I am more fortunate than the rest of the girls in that, when I leave school, I am not going to lose the teacher.”
Thatcher continued teaching, becoming headmaster of a private academy. Katherine chaired the English department there. They were married for over fifty years.
this was my childhood home
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