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.

[5] 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.

[5] World War I interrupted the work, but in June 1918, five months before it ended, she published an important article in The Nation, "The Virginia Man and the New Era for Women.

[14] 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.

[7] She established a workshop at the Konnarock Training School where Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee meet, with a curriculum focusing on the needs of rural young women and including health.

[7] In 1932 Hatcher convinced the photograph Doris Ullmann to document the people of Appalachia for the literature and fundraising of the Southern Woman's Educational Alliance, and Ullman agreed to take the commission.

[17] 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.

[21] She was translating the work of the neo-Latin poet Manutan, and writing an unpublished book on him, but the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 curtailed her trip to Mantua, Italy, and the project was dropped.