Beecher, Catharine

Beecher, Catharine (1800–1878), educator and social reformer.Beecher was born in East Hampton, New York, the oldest child of Lyman Beecher, a prominent Evangelical clergyman, and the sister of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the antislavery classic Uncle Tom's Cabin. Catharine Beecher's writings gained a wide readership in the decades before the Civil War because they so cogently expressed new views about the expanded power of middle‐class women in modern family life.

Beecher's career flourished in the dynamic cultural environment of the Antebellum Era. In 1823, she founded one of the new nation's most rigorous academies for women, the Hartford Female Seminary, and hitched her own star to the rising status of women as educators. In 1832, she followed her father and siblings to Cincinnati, Ohio, where, like them, she championed New England Evangelicalism in the multicultural environment of the American West.

Although she did not use the term, Beecher advocated “domestic feminism”—that is, expanded power for women within domestic life and ancillary power in the wider society. She was best known for Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), which was reprinted annually through 1856 and greatly expanded in a widely reprinted version coauthored with Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science (1869). Beecher's advice to women reflected contemporary economic changes that were relocating male labor and much of what had formerly been domestic production outside the household. She advised married women to exercise greater control over home life, including family finances, and to value their work as an honorable calling of great significance for the future of American democracy.
See also Domestic Labor; Feminism; Women's Rights Movements; Work.

Bibliography

Kathryn Kish Sklar , Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity, 1973.
Jeanne Boydston,, Mary Kelley,, and and Anne Margolis , The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere, 1988.

Kathryn Kish Sklar