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Martha Field’s Life

Martha R. Field, or Mattie as she was known to family and friends, was born in Lexington, Missouri in 1855, the daughter of a newspaperman, W. M. Smallwood. In the 1860s the family moved to New Orleans where Smallwood took a job with the New Orleans Times. His daughter was a precocious writer and worked for a time at the New Orleans Republican before moving to California to pursue a journalistic career at the San Francisco Chronicle. There she married Charles W. Field, a stockbroker, and gave birth in 1876 to a girl, Flora (known throughout her life as Flo). Soon after, her husband died and she became a young widowed mother, forced to support herself.

She returned to New Orleans, moved in with her parents—her mother’s maiden name was Emma Reinhard—and worked with her father at the Times. It was there that she first adopted the pen-name Catharine Cole. In 1881, Mrs. E. J. Nicholson, owner of the Picayune and a well-known poet writing under the pseudonym Pearl Rivers, hired Field as a full-time reporter. She was the first woman to hold a staff position on the newspaper.

Mrs. Nicholson nurtured her career by sending her several times to Europe for a working Grand Tour. She wrote a weekly column for the Picayune, "Catharine Cole’s Letter," and here, she was given free reign to her imagination. She wrote short sketches on personalities and literary topics, philosophic essays, fictional stories, subjects of particular interest to women, and travel pieces. She also edited and wrote an unsigned weekly column, "Women’s World and Work," a collection of news items about New Orleans women. In effect, she was the newspaper’s entire women’s department. Throughout her career she relentlessly supported working women, women's education, and the decent treatment of women in the workplace.

The Picayune was not only a daily; it also published a weekly mail edition which summarized the week’s events for farmers, lumbermen, and fishermen in the remote sections of the state. Through this medium, Catharine Cole’s name became known to virtually every literate adult in Louisiana. Her columns were clipped, passed around, and pasted in scrapbooks. When, in 1892, she began her horse-and-buggy progression through the parishes of Louisiana, detailing the riches and beauties of the remotest regions of the state, she was greeted everywhere she went as a celebrity writer.

Soon after she completed her writing tours of Louisiana she unexpectedly left the Picayune in February, 1894 for its rival, the Times-Democrat. She had been increasingly suffering hand tremors, and she was eventually diagnosed with "paralysis agitans," now Parkinson’s Disease. She spent her final years being cared for by her daughter Flo. During the last four months of her life she was bedridden at a Chicago sanitarium. She nevertheless continued to write columns from Chicago until three months before her death, dictating them to Flo.

She died in Chicago on December 19, 1898 at the age of forty-three. Her body was returned to New Orleans, and after a funeral attended by city officials, literary friends, and the newsroom staffs of the Picayune and Times-Democrat, she was interred in a tomb on the Louisiana soil she celebrated so eloquently.