Katharine Pearson Woods

Katharine Pearson Woods (January 28, 1853 – February 19, 1923) was an American novelist, labor activist, and advocate of Christian socialism.

Early life and work

Katharine Pearson Woods was born on January 28, 1853, in Wheeling, when it was still part of Virginia. She was eldest of three daughters of tobacco merchant Alexander Quarrier Woods and Josephine Augusta McCabe. The family moved to Baltimore, Maryland in 1856. After her father died when she was nine, her family lived with her grandfather, the Episcopalian Rev. James Dabney McCabe of St. James' Episcopal Church in West River, Maryland. Woods grew up well educated, though with little schooling outside the home, in a religious and literary atmosphere. Her uncle James Dabney McCabe Jr. also became an author.

In 1867, her mother moved the family back to Baltimore. At age 14, Woods won a poetry contest sponsored by a small Episcopalian paper, The Young Idea, and was rewarded with an engraving of Shakespeare at the court of Queen Elizabeth from Godey's Lady's Book. Poor health prevented her from attending school until 1873, when she entered a seminary run by the sisters Mrs. Converse and Miss Miller, the latter taught herself by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

In 1874 she joined the Society of All Saints Sisters of the Poor at Mount Calvary Church as a postulate, but soon withdrew due to her health problems.

Woods returned Wheeling, now part of West Virginia, in 1876 and spent the next decade there as a schoolteacher. Her work among the poor in Wheeling was a profound influence on the direction of her writing. Her first publications were in 1884: an account of a strike in Wheeling and two short stories about the plight of local nail workers. She became a crusader against labor injustice and after her return to Baltimore she joined the Knights of Labor in 1888.