One cannot read the notes from the early meetings without noticing the steady presence and guiding hand of French. When a chair quits, which happened four times in the first year, she moved that a committee be formed to find a replacement. She recruited the first guest speaker for the club, Judge Ben Lindsay. She gave instructions on how to behave during the Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar’s recital (“absolute silence”). It was her suggestion to get a lawyer to apply for a state charter, and she made many suggestions to amend the group’s bylaws. Every time the group encountered a problem, whenever something needed to be done or addressed, French was there to do it. She emerges from this mass of club minutiae as a capable, dedicated, insightful, practical, knowledgeable, and tireless woman.20
The gorgeous Georgian mansion that became the permanent home of the Woman’s Department Club was finished in 1925. The first lecture given in the new hall was French’s closing lecture of the 1924–1925 season. As seats had not yet been installed, audience members perched themselves on boxes that the construction workers had left behind. This worked out well, as the discomfort prompted each member to pledge “the price of one opera chair” for the new auditorium.21
Woman’s Department Club, Shreveport, interior. Photograph by Elizabeth DiSavino.
French stayed on as board chair until 1928 and continued teaching English literature every Friday for free long after that. She taught in her regalia, linking her students’ fledgling efforts with her own impressive academic achievements, and focused on her area of expertise: English and classical literature. Her lesson plans were detailed. She did not talk down to her students but expected them to keep up. A typical year of lectures covered the miracle plays, the morality plays, the early comedies, the early tragedies, Elizabethan drama, and Jacobean drama.22 But French’s goals were not only to educate the minds of the women of Shreveport but also to enlighten their spirits:
This course of lectures is presented this year, not so much to increase your knowledge in the abstract sense and develop dramatists, as to heighten your desire for more learning, until it becomes a yearning, an obsession for deeper truths, more lasting beauty, and more eternal good … to promote a great spiritual bond for all humanity…. This larger outlook that comes from books and work, brings with it a freedom, an emancipation from what is small and petty, with a contempt for wealth as wealth, and a contempt for power as power, and a contempt for society as society, and gives one instead interests and influences which should soften the hard places and make life brighter for many in reach…. Men may grow mighty of heart and mighty of mind, magnanimous, which is to be great in life, to have made progress in living. It is not to have more trappings, more public honours, more fortune, more footmen. He only is advancing in life whose heart is softer, whose blood is warmer, whose brain is quicker, whose soul is more personal, whose spirit is entering into living peace. This sheds an inward light and can vouchsafe an inward lustre that shall survive the undaunted quest, until the mind becomes a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which its possessor lives. This looking for beauty, with an open mind and open heart, will bring a greatness of thought, and consciously and unconsciously crowd back the evil, the unrest, the bitter, the hate, and show infinite values and final accumulation of all good. Let us determine to study more constantly every aspect of real knowledge, fill our minds only with things of permanent value, hoping some day to grasp deeper knowledge, to realize more exquisite beauty, more genuine good, and after all is said, that is Truth and that is Eternal.23
By 1920, the club had taken stands on several social issues, including a minimum wage for women, an eight-hour day for female industrial workers, and the stance that “part of a prisoner’s wages should be paid to his family.” These were relatively progressive positions for a southern women’s club to take. The fact that French held great influence in the Woman’s Department Club may hint at her own views on these issues.24
French took a few absences from the club during the time she was involved with it. She went home to Kentucky in 1920 to be with her mother during her final illness. Letters attest to the fact that her students appreciated her and fervently wished for her return.25 She did so after her mother’s death and recommenced her lectures. She took or considered taking other breaks from the club and apparently even considered leaving; each absence or any threat thereof was greeted with impassioned letters from her students imploring her to stay. “You have enriched my life beyond my power to ever express,” wrote one student. Another pleaded: “Surely you will not go? What will we do without you? What will the Department Club do without you? We all know that your unselfish work, your gifts of mind and heart have made the club. You have endeared yourself to this entire community, by the charm of personality, your many gifts of rare quality—your Christian virtues and graces—and the thought of having to give you up, brings sorrow to all of us.”26 One student even wrote an ode to her that began:
When French dons her Doctor’s hood and gown
We see the earnest woman’s eyes betray
A fond expectancy. She holds a sway
More sure than any queen with blazing crown.27
Two things are evident from these writings: that French’s students adored her and that she was a powerfully gifted teacher who succeeded in awakening in her students a yearning to connect with knowledge and enlightenment.
It was typical for French to receive gifts at the end of every lecture season. Her diary notes the grateful receipt of flowers, china, drawings, paintings, and silverware. Her lectures were always well attended; she noted that three hundred women attended a lecture in 1920, an observation supported by a statement in the Shreveport Times the same year: “Dr. French and Mrs. Ellerbe are planning the lectures again in the Council chamber, but I don’t know, those who came late last year stood up, and this year everybody is coming back—and then some.” Largely by dint of French’s charisma, women joined the Woman’s Department Club in droves. By 1941, it claimed a membership of one thousand. Membership may have been as high as sixteen hundred during World War II.28
Such adulation must have been hard to walk away from, and, indeed, French did not. She continued her work as a lecturer with the Woman’s Department Club for a total of eighteen years, and she served in other capacities as well: life member, vice president, chairman of literature, member of the board of directors. The twenty-fifth anniversary yearbook applauds her “joy and passion of the natural teacher” and states: “Her interest and cooperation have been felt throughout the club. A bronze plaque on the rear wall of the auditorium attests to the esteem in which Dr. French is held by this group of 1000 women.” It was presented to French at the close of her lecture series in 1936 and remains hanging today.29
Katherine Jackson French at the Woman’s Department Club of Shreveport. Courtesy of Katherine Tolbert Buckland.
The Professor: Centenary College and the AAUW
French’s light found other ways to shine. In 1924, a great opportunity came her way: the position of professor of English at Centenary College in Shreveport.
French began working at Centenary College in September 1924. She was to stay there for twenty-five years. Strangely, her diary contains no details about her hiring, noting only the date she began. The hiring process remains a mystery. It is possible that members of the college attended her lectures, realized what an outstanding teacher she was, and initiated the process that led to her hiring. It is also possible that her social skills and activities had something to do with it. She entertained and called on people frequently. Her “guest” list takes