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Katharine T. Kinkead{{Infobox person | name = Katharine T. Kinkead | birth_date = May 18, 1910 | birth_place = Galion, Ohio | death_date = November 18, 2001 (age 91) | death_place = Salisbury, Connecticut | education = M.A. 1932 | alma_mater = University of Wisconsin-Madison | years_active = 1934-1967 | spouse = Eugene Kinkead | children = 4 (Kathleen, Duncan, Maeve, Gwen) | relatives = Richard Theobald, brother
Katharine T. Kinkead was an American author, journalist, and staff writer at The New Yorker magazine for 25 years.
Biography
Katharine T. Kinkead grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, the daughter of German-American civil engineer Adolf Theobald and teacher Edith Jackson. She graduated with an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin, and a degree from the Sorbonne University in Paris, where she studied with French civilization professor Laurence Wylie. In 1934 while a receptionist in a false tooth factory in Ohio, she was offered an editorial position with publisher William Morrow & Co. in New York City for $20 a week "with excellent future”. She took the job, married New Yorker writer and editor Eugene Kinkead several years later, and joined The New Yorker'' as a staff writer in 1942.
Writing Career
One of the first women reporters at The New Yorker, Kinkead was a pathbreaking 20th century female journalist. She pioneered coverage on subjects taboo in the 1940s and 1950s, such as unwed mothers, teen runaways, adoption, and New York's Home Term Court for domestic abuse and troubled families, as well as the American Feline Society and rose breeding.[1] Her writing voice was characterized by humanism, a light touch, and optimism. She maintained she could not write about taboo subjects, including unwed mothers and runaways, until William Shawn succeeded founder Harold Ross as New Yorker editor in 1952 because the brilliant, profane Ross was priggish.
Kinkead also examined political processes in Reporters at Large on the League of Women Voters and American foreign exchange programs, including a federal initiative bringing young sub-Saharan Africans to study in U.S. colleges to introduce them to democracy. Her 1961 book on Yale University, How an Ivy League College Decides on Admissions, (W. W. Norton & Company) was the first to explain the process by which an elite college selects its freshman class, subsequently a publishing staple. Kinkead's civil rights reportage on the first sit-ins in the U.S., It Doesn't Seem Quick to Me (Desegregating Durham) 1961, is anthologized in The '60s: The Story of a Decade, The New Yorker’s collection of classic pieces from the 1960s.
Personal Life
A shy perfectionist and intellectual, Kinkead maintained her career while raising four children. She and her husband Eugene Kinkead were one of several couples writing for The New Yorker in its formative years. Their Chappaqua, N.Y. home reverberated with the clatter of their typewriters from adjoining studies, demonstrating that enterprising women had no barriers to achievement, a model bolstered by their feminist women friends pursuing careers in New York City and Hollywood in the 1940s-1960s when women could not serve on juries, own credit cards or use birth control without their husband's consent or co-signature, or enroll in certain Ivy League colleges.[2]
Kinkead lived 22 years in Chappaqua, New York and summered in Truro, Massachusetts. In her final years, she worked on an unpublished biography of 15th century feminist poet and queen consort Marguerite of Angouleme, sister of Francis 1st, King of France.
Bibliography
Books
How an Ivy League College Decides on Admissions. W. W. Norton & Company. 1961
Walk Together, Talk Together: The American Field Service Student Exchange Program. W. W. Norton & Company, 1962
Articles (Partial Selection)
A Cat in Every Home, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats. Random House. 2013
It Doesn't Seem Quick to Me (Desegregating Durham), The 60s: The Story of A Decade. Modern Library. 2017
Something to Take Back Home, The New Yorker. January 1, 1964
A Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Business, The New Yorker. July 11, 1958
Runaways, The New Yorker. February 15, 1952
They Love Mamie in Augusta, McCall’s Magazine. September, 1953
The Lonely Time, (unwed mothers), The New Yorker. January 12, 1951
Just Give Us Peace in Our Home, (troubled families), The New Yorker, December 3, 1945
Miss Latimer and her Kit B., The New Yorker, November 3, 1944
References
- ^ Kinkead, Katharine T. (December 17, 2001). "Katharine T. Kinkead, obituary". No. New York, New York. Newsday. Associated Press. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- ^ LaMotte, Sandee (April 23, 2023). [gttos://ww.cnn.com/2023/04/23/health/abortion-lessons-jane-wellness/index.html "These Women Ran an Underground Abortion Network in the l960s"]. CNN. Retrieved September 2, 2024.