How Katharine Got That Way

Abstract

How could a girl born in 1911 into a narrow-minded, antiSemitic, bigoted, working-class, WASP family have grown into a radical woman who helped change the study of American literature? Our mother, Katharine Dealy Newman, was so unlike her birth family that her mother often shook her head in bewilderment, saying, how did you get to be like that? This question was meant, of course, to be disparaging, but Katharine, over many painful, growth-seeking years, came to take that difference as a challenge, a way to define herself. What had been agony in her childhood became a source of identification and bonding with others who also lived apart from mainstream society. In Mother's earliest years, the 1920s and 30s, this meant connecting with Jews, people of color, and those who had also gotten that way. Much later it meant actively defying the establishment by instituting curricula and writing books and articles about the literature of multiethnic people. Mother came to recognize that the uniqueness of each of us is what unites us. By embracing and honoring human differences, she found that she could transform her pain into service by helping other people become proud of our diversity. From her earliest days, when she befriended an ostracized Jewish girl and played with Catholic boys in her father's Boy Scout troop, she broke through the barriers set by her society. Painfully disappointed by most of her birth family, she set out to create a replacement family. A beloved high school science teacher became a surrogate mother; her journalism teacher a father figure; and, in college, a theater buddy stepped into the role of brother. These re-