Beecher, Catharine (1800-1878)

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Catharine Beecher (1800-1878)

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An Evangelical Childhood . Born in 1800 as the eldest child of Lyman Beecher, Catharine Beecher enjoyed a special relationship with her high-spirited father when he was a young, dynamic minister first on Long Island and then in Litchfield, Connecticut. Raised on a New England farm, Lyman Beecher played pranks on his eleven children, joined them in chopping wood and hoeing the garden, and participated with gusto in their rural tramps and games. He also taught them his robust Calvinism, badgering them with reminders of sin and a vividly imagined hell. Yet Catharine also was influenced by her genteel mother, Roxana Foote Beecher, as well as the education she received from age ten in the works of eighteenth-century British authors, admonitions to female virtue, and the genteel accomplishments at Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy. A lively and intelligent child, Catharine excelled in social situations and participated vigorously in school and community contests and games. On Roxana’s death from consumption in 1816, she assumed full care of her seven younger siblings until her father’s remarriage a year later. When in her early twenties she had not yet experienced conversion, her father pressed the issue until she fell ill. Catharine could not feel guilty enough to submit. Her religious crisis intensified when her fiance, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, died in a shipwreck, and Lyman Beecher intimated that the young man may have been damned. Catharine’s loss became a theological confrontation with her father and her God. Unable to accept eternal punishment for those who died without conversion, she immersed herself in intellectual study and did not join a church until she left the family home and moved to Hartford, Connecticut.

Becoming an Educator. In Hartford, Beecher achieved both personal and professional independence through the school she started in 1823, the Hartford Female Seminary. Living in a rented home with her siblings Mary, Harriet, and Henry, she appropriated for herself her father’s cultural leadership in 1826 by initiating a revival in her school. She also became an educational reformer and entrepreneur, introducing an advanced curriculum for girls and raising funds for a building. As she worked out ideas she published in The Elements of Moral Philosophy, Founded upon Experience, Reason, and the Bible in 1831, she rejected the evangelical conversion experience and concluded that salvation could be achieved through a blameless life. Women, she believed, should submit their self-interest to the general good in order to act as moral guardians and shape the nation’s standards. Merging her father’s evangelical goals with her mother’s refined gentility, Beecher turned her seminary to the training of teachers, who, she hoped, would exert a restraining moral influence on the democratic nation. When she accompanied her father on his move to Cincinnati in 1832, she planned to duplicate her Hartford success in the West, organizing within a year her Western Female Institute. This Cincinnati school soon resembled a conventional female academy and failed within four years. Beecher did not give up. In 1835 she joined Lyman Beecher’s plea for education in the West, publishing an address she delivered to women in the East, An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers. Like her father, Beecher played on Eastern fears, urging the training of female teachers to civilize immigrants and the lower classes. One-third of Western children, she estimated, were unschooled; as men sought wealth in the market economy, the task of a national system of moral education would fall to energetic and benevolent women such as herself. Three years later, when she published The Moral Instructor for Schools and Families (1838), Beecher assumed the role that would bring her national acclaim; rejecting the individualized conversion experience of evangelical Calvinism, she focused on the family as a socializing force and the cultivated conscience as an agency of moral authority appropriate for the rapidly expanding democratic society.

Domestic Ideology . In 1841 Catharine Beecher wove these themes into her discussion of “The Peculiar Responsibilities of American Women,” which introduced her Treatise on Domestic Economy. Urging women to support democratic institutions, she argued that to achieve social order hierarchical relationships also had to be maintained. Reiterating the responsible free agency she had learned from her father, she insisted that in democratic America, women could choose their superiors, submitting voluntarily to their husbands. American women would not participate in political life, yet they would mold the minds, morals, and manners of their children. Their reward would be participation in the providential plan as democratic equality spread throughout the world. As Beecher went on to instruct women in principles of domestic economy, she sought to transcend barriers of region and social class, creating national allegiance to a common culture. Democratizing the genteel values with which she had been raised, she argued that refinement was compatible with work. All was moving and changing in nineteenth-century America, she wrote: economic fortunes rose and fell; people in new settlements lived in log cabins; domestic servants were difficult to obtain; and individuals of all social classes mingled with and emulated those of larger means. According to Beecher, a democratic lady in her neat oilcloth apron need not forego gentility even as she performed her own domestic work. In a democracy, she argued, mothers should teach daughters, and teachers their pupils, that it was refined and ladylike to engage in domestic pursuits.

Teachers for the West. In the 1840s Beecher became the promoter and publicist of an organization ostensibly headed by her brother-in-law Calvin Stowe that proposed to raise funds to send young women as missionary teachers to the West. In 1847 she trained thirty-five young women in Albany, New York, and thirty-five more in Hartford to travel to Western states to teach district and subscription schools, found Sunday schools, and serve as moral influences in their communities. Eventually this Central Committee for Promoting National Education, which was moved to Cleveland by its general agent William Slade and renamed The National Board of Popular Education, sent out as many as 450 female teachers. After a confrontation with Slade, Beecher founded The American Women’s Educational Association (AWEA) in 1852, seeking to replace the rural missionary teacher with women’s colleges in urban settings. In the early 1850s she focused her attention on The Milwaukee Female College, where she hoped to prepare young women to be professional teachers and homemak-ers. By 1856, however, Beecher’s plan to establish a home in Milwaukee had not materialized, and she withdrew from the college and resigned from the AWEA to end her career as an educator. Like her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, she continued to ponder her heritage of New England Calvinism until she became an Episcopalian. Returning to Hartford, she briefly resumed her work at the still successful Hartford Female Seminary until she retired to her brother’s home in Elmira, New York, shortly before her death in 1878.