Katharina von Bora was the daughter of a Jan von Bora auf Lippendorf and his wife Margarete, whose family name has not been established. Both were only specifically mentioned in the year 1505. It is certain that her father sent the five-year-old Katharina to the Benedictine cloister in Brehna in 1504 for education. This is documented in a letter from Laurentius Zoch to Martin Luther, written on October 30, 1531. This letter is the only evidence for Katharina von Bora's time spent within the monastery. At the age of nine she moved to the Cistercian monastery of Marienthron (Mary's Throne) in Nimbschen, near
Catharine McClellan doing so, she helped standardize the rules for transcribing oral history. Catharine’s attitude towards her Northern research was inherently feminist. At the age of 25 she married cultural ecologist John Hitchcock. Their scholarly partnership began when they worked at the University of Wisconsin, Madison together, though they were not romantically involved until years later. Catharine graduated from her undergraduate degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 1942. From there she moved to California to study at the University of California, Berkeley beginning in 1946 where she was supervised by Robert Lowie. In 1950 Catharine received her PhD from American