Wilder, Catharine Kerlin, 1906-2006

Catharine Kerlin was born in Camden, New Jersey the daughter of Ward Dix Kerlin, co-owner of the Camden Forge, and Sarah Jenney Gilbert Kerlin, a women's suffrage activist on the state level and then, after 1920, active in the League of Women Voters. Theirs was a fairly prosperous family and the Kerlin children, Catharine and her two brothers, attended private schools, mostly those run by Quakers, and spent their summers at camps in northern New Hampshire. Catharine Kerlin graduated from Smith College in 1929 with a degree in history; her honors thesis, directed by the eminent historian Merle Curti, focused on the Anti-Imperialist League in 1900. After graduation, she travelled in Europe for a few months before settling down in Geneva to work for the American Committee to the League of Nations which was sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Such private funding was necessary, of course, because the US had never signed the Treaty of Versailles nor joined the organization that grew out of that treaty, the League of Nations. Nonethless, the international peace movement in the interwar years was a vibrant, active community, one in which Catherine Kerlin was a very much a part of.

However, unlike her friend, Hope Sewell French, who made such work her life's career, Kerlin chose a more conventional path. She had first met Amos Niven Wilder, a theologian and poet (and brother of the novelist/playwright, Thornton Wilder), in 1929, shortly after she arrived in Europe. But it was when they met again in the summer of 1934 that a romance began and a year later, the couple married in August, 1935. In the year before she married, Catharine Kerlin Wilder taught history at the Friends Academy in Locust Valley, New York; she had previously taught history as well as English at the International School of Geneva. Thereafter, it was Amos Niven Wilder's career which directed the family's life. When the couple first married, Amos Wilder was a professor of the New Testament at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Massachusetts. By the time he accepted a position at the Chicago Theological School in 1943, Catharine Kerlin Wilder had given birth to Catharine Dix Wilder ("Dixie") in 1937 and Amos Tappan Wilder ("Tappy") in 1940. In 1954, Wilder was named Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School and the family then moved back east, settling in Cambridge, spending summers in their second home in South Blue Hill, Maine.

Throughout these years, Catharine Kerlin Wilder, as one obituary put it, "played a prominent role as a faculty spouse." She was also active in clubs, joining the prestigious Saturday Morning Club in Boston in 1961, and engaged in charitable work for the public library and the Kneisel Hall School of Music, both in Blue Hill. After his retirement in 1963, the Wilders travelled around the world extensively for the next few decades. A few years after her husband died in 1993, Catharine Kerlin Wilder moved to a nursing home in Brunswick, Maine, closer to her daughter. In 2000, she published her memoir entitled Milestones in My Life . Three month shy of her 100th birthday, Catharine Kerlin Wilder died in Maine and is buried next to her husband in Mount Carmel Burial Ground, Hamden, Connecticut.

From the guide to the Catharine Kerlin Wilder Papers MS 709., 1813-2000, (Sophia Smith Collection)