Orie Latham Hatcher

Orie Latham Hatcher (December 10, 1868 – April 1, 1946) was an American feminist educational reformer.

Early life and education She was born in Petersburg, Virginia, into an old and privileged Virginia family. Her mother, Orania Virginia Snead, was a trustee of Hartshorn Memorial College, a private college for African American women in Richmond, Virginia. The name Orie from the mother's Orania is what linguists call semihomonymous naming, and theirs is considered a notable example. She rarely used the name Orie, however, preferring to be referred to as Latham Hatcher (for her rural education work), O. L. Hatcher (for academic work), or O. Latham Hatcher (for both). Her father, William Eldridge Hatcher, founded Fork Union Military Academy, served as president of the board of trustees of Richmond College, and was a Baptist pastor. Latham Hatcher graduated from the Richmond Female Institute in 1884 at age 15. She earned a doctorate in English literature from the University of Chicago in 1903.

Academic career Hatcher taught at Bryn Mawr College in the Comparative and Elizabethan Literature department, receiving tenure in 1911 and serving as chair from 1910 to 1915.

In 1914 she met in Richmond with Mary-Cooke Branch Munford and a group of influential women to discuss Southern women's education.

Work as an educational reformer As a result of the 1914 Richmond summit with Munford, they formed the Virginia Bureau of Vocations for Women, with Hatcher as its first president. She specifically pushed against the image of the Southern belle as only gaining an education to attract a husband. In it she claimed that "Nowhere else in the South... has a certain conception of what a woman should be and do persisted so fervently as in Virginia." She later established chapters of the Alliance in New York and Chicago, receiving grants from Rockefeller and Carnegie, among others. She conducted a national survey at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. She published three studies in the same year, 1931, based on a study of 255 girls in 1927 that became Rural Girls in the City for Work. The latter documented for the first time how often women who left farms and other rural living situations to work in cities became the victims of sexual assault, particularly in boarding houses. The universities of North Carolina and Virginia allied with her work. Hatcher became a consultant for the Youth Conference of the Department of the Interior, and a member of the White House Conference on Children in a Democracy. This funding helped open the Appalachia region to Ullman, and led her to create one of her most significant images, that of a racially mixed musical ensemble.

Archives and special collections Many of her papers are in the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Duke University, including her collection of 481 rare Italian Renaissance books. As a comparative literature scholar she spoke modern Italian and read classical Italian. She purchased much of her collection on a 1907 book-buying trip to Italy. She was translating the work of the neo-Latin poet Manutan, and writing an unpublished book on him, but the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 curtailed her trip to Mantua, Italy, and the project was dropped.