Catharine Beecher

American author and educator Catharine Beecher (1800-1878) was responsible for creating a new social attitude that placed greater value on women's work in the home and their role as educators and moral guides for the young. Her book Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) was a best-selling work that provided practical household advice while extolling the virtues of domestic life. She also was an active proponent for the creation of schools for women, arguing that for their special role as instructors of children, women required a thorough education.

Catharine Beecher was a nineteenth century proponent of women's rights and education for women. While she did not advocate a radical change in women's roles, she did fight for increased recognition of the importance of the work women did in managing homes and raising families. She also believed that women should expand their place in society by becoming teachers, allowing them to use their nurturing skills and moral conscience in a professional sphere. To encourage the spread of these ideas, Beecher published a number of books providing guidance and praise for domestic life, such as her extremely popular Treatise on Domestic Economy (1843). She also founded schools and organizations devoted to training women to become teachers. Beecher held the view that the woman, as educator and spiritual guide for families, was the basis of a well-ordered and moral society. This theme contributed to a growing feminist attitude that women did not have to be weak, passive creatures, but could be strong, contributing members of their communities.

Beecher was born September 6, 1800, in the town of East Hampton on Long Island, New York. She was the oldest child of Lyman and Roxanna Ward Beecher. Each of her parents had a strong influence on the values she touted as an adult. Her father was a Presbyterian minister who came from a family of Calvinist colonists. He was a prominent figure in the evangelical religious movement of the early 1800s known as the Second Great Awakening. His strong personality and religious convictions were apparent not only in the religious revivals that he held, but in his dominant presence in the Beecher home as well. Beecher's mother, also from a respected family, played a traditional role in the home and attempted to pass along her domestic skills to her children. Beecher was ambivalent about both the religious and domestic aspects of her life as a young woman. She initially disliked domestic duties, preferring to spend her time outside or studying. Later in life, however, she came to view domestic responsibilities as a valuable and sacred contribution to home and community. Similarly, her religious instincts fluctuated throughout her life, and she never was able to come to terms with her faith.

The Beechers moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1809. The following year, Beecher entered Miss Pierce's school, a well-respected institution for young women. Her education there stressed not only the acquisition of social skills, but also the growth of a moral consciousness and leadership abilities. Beecher thrived at the school, but was forced to leave at the age of 16 after the death of her mother. She returned home to tend to the domestic duties of the household, including raising her younger brothers and sisters and doing the cooking and sewing for the family. After her father remarried in 1817, she remained for another year at home before taking a teaching job in New London, Connecticut, in 1818.

Focused on Education of Women

At the age of 22, Beecher was engaged to a Yale University professor of natural history named Alexander Fisher. Her choice was not a whole-hearted one, however. While her father was quite pleased with Fisher, Beecher herself was concerned that his unaffectionate nature would not make him an ideal husband. The marriage never occurred—Fisher was killed in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland in the spring of 1822. Beecher never again entertained thoughts of marriage. Instead, she turned her energies to what would become her life's main passion, the education of women.

In 1823, Beecher opened the Hartford Female Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut. At her school, she combined a solid core of courses in algebra, chemistry, history, Latin, philosophy, and rhetoric with an emphasis on developing the moral and religious character of her students. The institution was very successful, and as its principal, Beecher became a popular and respected figure in Hartfield. Her accomplishments and her growing reputation as a talented teacher inspired Beecher to write about her educational philosophy. In her 1829 essay, "Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education, " she declared that the primary goal of education should be to provide a basis for the development of the student's conscience and moral makeup. To facilitate this kind of instruction in her school, Beecher unsuccessfully sought to hire an associate principal to manage the teaching of religion. Failing to secure an assistant, Beecher suffered from a nervous breakdown and left the school in the hands of her sister Harriet for several months while she recovered. Upon her return, she took on the task of religious and moral instruction herself.

With the beginning of the 1830s, Beecher became more interested in the roles her female students would take on in society. While she believed that running a home and raising a family was an important and influential contribution by women, she also felt that women should be given more responsibility and respect outside the home. She saw the field of teaching as the perfect professional arena for women—it allowed them an independent and consequential role in their community, but at the same time it was an acceptably "feminine" role. In addition, the growing populations of the western areas of the country were creating an increased demand for teachers. Beecher was appalled that in states like Ohio, perhaps one third of children did not have access to schools.

Founded School for Teacher Training

To encourage more women to become teachers, Beecher realized, there needed to be more opportunities for women to be educated and trained for the profession. She made it her mission to provide such training. In 1831, she left the East Coast to join her father in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he had been name president of the Lane Theological Seminary. There she opened the Western Female Institute, a school devoted to instructing young women so that they, in turn, could instruct others. Beecher hoped that her school could serve as a model for a nationwide system of teacher colleges. She presented her ideas on the subject in an 1835 lecture that was published under the title "An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers." In Cincinnati, she began a fundraising effort to support her school and the creation of similar schools. But Beecher was not well-liked in the city; many people felt that she was a cultural elitist. Her abolitionist views were also suspect in an area divided on the issue of slavery. Unable to win the financial or philosophical support of residents, enrollment in Beecher's school steadily declined until it was finally forced to close in 1837.

The townspeople's opinions apparently had little effect on Beecher's own values, however. That same year, she published a tract that called on women to unite against the system of slavery, titled "Slavery and Abolition with Reference to the Duty of American Females." In this essay, Beecher began to formulate her idea that women could have a powerful influence on the character of the nation by creating a virtuous and harmonious domestic realm, in this way providing a stable, moral basis for society. Writing became the new channel through which Beecher attempted to spread her philosophy and make a living. She began to turn out a large amount of material, but it was not until the publication of her Treatise on Domestic Economy in 1841 that she finally reached the wider audience that she sought. The book was an incredible success, going through almost 15 printings in as many years and earning her fame across the nation.

Celebrates Domesticity in Best-seller

The Treatise provided women with a practical and moral guide to domestic life. It presented information on such topics as cooking, child care, and general health care. In this way, it presented a handy single source of household knowledge that had not existed before. But even more important was the philosophy in which Beecher couched her advice. She saw such domestic concerns not as mundane drudgery but as "the greatest work, " a devotion to the welfare of others that provided the basis of a healthy society. The mission of women, according to Beecher, was to form the moral and intellectual character of children, and in order to fulfill this duty successfully, women required a quality education. Through their examples of skilled nurturing and intelligent teaching, women could use their home life as a secure base from which to reach out and create change in the rest of society. Beecher's ideas did not radically attack traditional gender roles, rather it justified and glorified them. This support of the family and social hierarchy struck a chord of comfort and stability in the public, making Beecher a celebrity.

With the success of her book, Beecher was able to found the Women's Education Association in New York in 1852. The organization was devoted to raising funds for the establishment of women's schools. Beecher was never satisfied with the amount of money raised by the organization (it eventually dissolved in 1862), so she undertook a number of public appearances across the country in which she solicited donations, promoted women's education, and discussed her books. She also sought donations from friends and relatives for her education ventures. She further supported educational causes by attending teacher's conferences and sustaining a correspondence with a wide range of people.

In the last years of her life, Beecher returned to the East, where she lived with various relatives. She had a particularly close relationship with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, best-known as the author of the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The sisters worked together to write an 1869 sequel to the Treatise on Domestic Economy entitled The American Woman's Home. Beecher was active in fighting for women's education for the rest of her years. She died in Elmira, New York, on May 12, 1878. Through her writings, public appearances, and the schools she helped to found, Beecher had helped to gain recognition for the value of women's work in society. Although she did not challenge the traditionally subordinate place of females, she did present a new vision of women as a strong and influential force that helped to determine the direction and conscience of the nation. Her emphasis on bringing women into the teaching profession also changed notions about women's education and careers, providing a basis for the continued growth of feminist thought in the nineteenth century.

Further Reading

See also Barker-Benfield, Graham J., and Catherine Clinton, Portraits of American Women, St. Martin's Press, 1991; Kerber, Linda K., and Jane S. DeHart, Women's America, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 1991; and Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catharine Beecher: A Study in Domesticity, W. W. Norton, 1976. □

Catharine Beecher (1800-1878)

Sources

Advocate for women’s education

Activist Family. The oldest child of Lyman Beecher, the nation’s most prominent evangelical preacher of the 1820s and 1830s, and the sister of Henry Ward Beecher (the “Shakespeare of the pulpit,” as he came to be known) and Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852), Catharine grew up in a home actively engaged in saving souls and reforming society. Born in isolated and rural East Hampton, Long Island, at the age of nine she moved with her family to fashionable and class-conscious Litchfield, Connecticut. Although in East Hampton, Catharine’s parents taught her at home, when her family relocated, she began attending a private girls’ school. At sixteen the death of her mother forced Catharine to take charge of the Beecher household. It was then that she decided to go into teaching so that she could contribute to the family income. Absorbing her father’s phenomenal energy and abounding sense of mission, Catharine quickly rose to prominence.

Philosophy of Nurturing. Beecher devoted most of her life to explaining and implementing her philosophy of women’s education at a time when many Americans questioned the necessity of educating females. Central to her beliefs about women and education was the idea of mothers and teachers as natural nurturers of young people. She felt strongly that it was vital for mothers and teachers actively to take part in the business of education. She believed that women had a special duty to sustain the moral and social fabric of each generation of Americans. “The peculiar responsibilities of American women” was how she described a woman’s duty in her famous Treatise on Domestic Economy, published in 1841. “In the matters pertaining to the education of their children ... and in all questions relating to morals or manners, they [American women] have a superior influence.” Throughout her numerous publications Beecher argued repeatedly that women’s innate domestic and teaching abilities, properly defined, were not only the basis of women’s social advancement but also the foundation of social order. The future of American democracy itself, she argued, depended on “the intellectual and moral character of the mass of people.” The shaping of that character, she concluded, was “committed mainly to the female hand.” This social vision demanded that women receive the proper training to carry out their unique domestic mission, and Beecher dedicated her life to providing such education for the women of the United States.

Women’s Institutions. Beecher’s career as an educator and advocate for women’s expanded social role flourished in the dynamic environment of antebellum America. In 1823 she founded one of the fledgling nation’s most rigorous academies of higher education for women, the Hartford (Connecticut) Female Seminary. The Hartford school offered one of the few places in America where women could go for education beyond the elementary level. The seminary taught grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, and many of the other subjects found in the curricula of men’s colleges. In 1832 she followed her father and siblings to Cincinnati, where she established and directed the Western Female Institute (1832–1837), which carried on the work that she had begun in Hartford. In 1847 Beecher founded the Board of National Popular Education, which recruited hundreds of young schoolmarms for the new states. Five years later she helped create the American Women’s Educational Association. In addition to founding various institutions and organizations for women’s education Beecher actively promoted and embraced the vision of the common school movement that Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and others were leading. As she began to devote an increasing amount of her time and effort to school reform, her ideas about women’s role in society and the importance of public education melded into a sort of personal crusade that she never relinquished until her death at the age of seventy-eight.

Woman of Her Time. Catharine Beecher was an untiring organizer of women’s schools and colleges and a resourceful fighter for the advancement of female teachers. As a prolific writer and educator Beecher led the way in vocalizing the importance of professionalizing women’s domestic and educational roles. She was in the end, however, a product of her environment. In expressing her views about the expanded power of women in the domestic sphere, she rarely criticized the political, social, and economic inequalities that divided men and women. Rather, Beecher tried to reconcile the many middle-class women who read her books and attended her schools with the existing patterns of female subordination in America. In fact Beecher did not support the first movement for women’s rights. Beecher’s views appear tame compared with those of the more-radical female activists of her day, but her lifelong efforts guaranteed that women would exert increasing influence on the developing nation. In the end Beecher helped to pave the way for modern assumptions about the place of women in American society.

Sources

Joan Burstyn, “Catharine Beecher and the Education of American Women,” New England Quarterly, 47 (1974): 386-403;

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1976).

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

Catharine Esther Beecher 1800–1878, American educator, b. East Hampton, N.Y.; daughter of Lyman Beecher. She first taught in New London, Conn., and in 1824 founded a girls' school in Hartford. Later she organized the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati (1832) and similar institutions in Quincy, Ill., Milwaukee, and Burlington, Iowa. Author of works on religion, health, and domestic science (which she introduced in her schools), Beecher was indefatigable in the promotion of liberal education for women, although she opposed woman suffrage.

Bibliography: See biographies by M. E. Harveson (1932, repr. 1969) and K. K. Sklar (1973).

Beecher, Catharine E[sther] (1800–1878), daughter of Lyman Beecher and sister of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her work as an educator and reformer included the founding of schools for young ladies at Hartford (1824) and Cincinnati, and main responsibility for the founding of women's colleges in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Her writings include An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism (1837); The Evils Suffered by American Women and …Children (1846); Women Suffrage (1871), on a movement she opposed; and Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions (1874).