Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley (1881-1965). American journalist and author. Born and raised in Winchester, MA, a suburb of Boston, Elizabeth Sergeant graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1903. In 1910, Pauline Goldmark sent her to Cather at McClure’s Magazine with a proposed article, published as “Toilers of the Tenements,” and Cather and Sergeant became lifelong friends. In 1914 Sergeant became one of the original contributors to the New Republic. While on assignment in France in 1917 she was injured by a land mine; her injury and recuperation were the subject of Shadow-Shapes: Journal of a Wounded Woman (1920). She moved to New Mexico in 1920 and became involved with the Taos artists colony and advocated for Native American rights, but her work frequently took her back to New York City. She included Cather in her collection of portraits of prominent Americans, Fire under the Andes (1927). Sergeant studied with Carl Jung and Toni Woolf in Zurich, Switzerland, from 1929 to 1931. When she returned to the U.S. she sold her house in New Mexico and settled in New York City, writing many magazine articles about authors and psychological topics. She later moved to Rockland County, NY. Cather’s letters to Sergeant comment frequently on both her own and Sergeant’s writing and testify to a strong and lively friendship maintained despite Sergeant's being a committed reformer and far to the left of Cather politically and culturally. Sergeant’s Willa Cather: A Memoir (1953) includes extensive paraphrases of Cather’s letters to her.

Goldmark, Josephine Clara (1877-1950). American social reformer. Born in Brooklyn, NY, to Polish and Czech Jewish parents whose families fled Austria after the Revolution of 1848, Goldmark earned a BA in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1898; she then studied an additional year and tutored at Barnard College. Her sister Pauline introduced her to Florence Kelley of the National Consumers League, which sparked her interest in what became her life’s work, social research and reform, with an emphasis on working conditions for women and children. Cather met Josephine Goldmark and her sisters Pauline and Alice (who married Louis Dembitz Brandeis and lived in Boston) when she was on assignment in Boston for McClure’s Magazine in 1907-1908. Josephine Goldmark and Cather became lifelong friends, although extant correspondence is scant. Cather admired Goldmark’s book Pilgrims of ’48: One Man’s Part in the Austrian Revolution of 1848, and a Family Migration to America (1930), about the Goldmark, Wehle, Dembitz, and Brandeis families during the Austrian revolution and their lives in the U.S. (Josephine’s mother was a Wehle). In later years she and her sister Pauline lived in Hartsdale, NY. Josephine died in White Plains, NY.