Catharine Beecher

American educator

• Born: September 6, 1800
• Birthplace: East Hampton, New York
• Died: May 12, 1878
• Place of death: Elmira, New York

While she pursued higher status and influence for women in the domestic arena, Beecher promoted women’s education, urging professionalization and appreciation of women’s traditional roles.

Early Life

The eldest of nine children, Catharine Esther Beecher was influenced most deeply by her father, Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian minister descended from a long line of Calvinist colonial ancestors. Her mother, Roxana Ward Beecher, also from a prominent family, was reared traditionally and passed many of her domestic skills to her children. Catharine resisted these domestic tasks initially, preferring intellectual and outdoor activities.

Lyman Beecher played a major role in the Second Great Awakening , an evangelical movement that spread throughout the United States during the early nineteenth century. He used revivals to seek conversion and social cohesion in his communities. As a child, Catharine was enveloped by her father’s dominant personality and religious zeal, and all of her life she struggled with her faith, never completely embracing it or completely deserting it.

In 1809, the Beecher family moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, a conservative town and site of a renowned law school as well as a celebrated school for young ladies. Catharine entered Miss Pierce’s school in 1810, keeping a journal that reveals not only the school’s emphasis on the social graces but also on the development of a social consciousness. She flourished in those years, exercising leadership and other social skills.

After Roxana died in 1816, Catharine left school to take on domestic duties, supervising her younger siblings, cooking, and sewing. Her father remarried in late 1817, but Catharine lived at home for a while longer, the ties between father and daughter remaining very strong. At the age of eighteen, she left Litchfield to teach in New London, Connecticut.

In 1822, Catharine became engaged to Alexander Fisher, a Yale professor in natural philosophy. Her father approved of Fisher wholeheartedly, but Catharine was uncertain about his potential as a husband, finding him somewhat lacking in affection. In April of 1822, Fisher died at sea when his ship crashed into cliffs on the west coast of Ireland. Catharine remained single throughout her life, devoting herself to the education of women.

Life’s Work

In 1823, Catharine Beecher opened a school in Hartford, Connecticut; it flourished, allowing her to exert social, religious, and intellectual leadership. The Hartford Female Seminary offered courses in rhetoric, logic, chemistry, history, philosophy, Latin, and algebra. As principal, Beecher’s status rose, and she socialized with Hartford’s most respected citizens of both genders. Her self-confidence grew along with her competence as an educator. She began expanding and expounding her ideas of good pedagogy.

Beecher placed great emphasis on molding the moral character of her students. In 1829, she published an essay entitled “Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education.” In it, she stated that the most important objective of education was “the foundation of the conscience, and the direction of the moral character and habits.” To accomplish such training, Beecher tried to hire an associate principal to direct the religious teaching but she was unsuccessful. Suffering a nervous collapse, she took several months rest away from Hartford while her sister, Harriet Beecher, filled in for her at the school. Upon her return to Hartford, Catharine herself gave moral instruction.

During the 1830’s, Beecher became focused on women’s roles and the need for more professionalism. She clearly expected women to exercise power in the home as mothers and outside it as schoolteachers. The means for enhancing this power would be a better-crafted education. Beecher viewed teaching as a noble profession, enabling women to have influence, respectability, and independence while maintaining themselves within the accepted boundaries of femininity. The time was ripe for such thinking.

The 1830’s and 1840’s were decades of dramatic population growth in the United States. This growing population called for more teachers. Although men had dominated the profession, fewer males were available to teach, because many of them chose to go into industrial or commercial careers. Tax-supported schools, a leisured female middle class, and the emphasis on women’s nurturing qualities all aided Beecher as she began to focus on teacher training.

Resigning her position in September of 1831, Beecher left Hartford to be with her father, who had accepted the presidency of Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Seminary. They arrived in Cincinnati in the spring of 1832. Within a year, Catharine Beecher founded the Western Female Institute, dedicated to both the acquisition of knowledge and moral development.

Choosing not to be fully employed in the school, Beecher busied herself with social activities and some writing. She spoke to a group of women in New York in 1835, and her lecture, “An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers,” was published in New York and Cincinnati. She presented a plan for women to educate the children of immigrants and working-class families in the West.

Beecher noted that one-third of Ohio’s children were without schools and that thousands of teachers would be needed to staff new schools. She envisioned her Western Female Institute as the model seminary for a national system whereby women would be trained and, in turn, would train others to educate American children and youth. She began a fund-raising campaign, appealing to Cincinnati’s wealthy citizens to endow the seminary and others like it. The Cincinnati elite did not contribute, however, in part because Catharine Beecher and her father were regarded as troublemakers. Some members of Cincinnati society were angered by what they believed was a certain cultural snobbery expressed by Catharine Beecher. Further antagonism was generated by the Beechers’ strong support for abolition in a city much divided over the issue even before their arrival.

The Western Female Institute closed in 1837 because of low enrollment and Beecher’s alienation of her constituency. Some of Cincinnati’s aristocratic families saw her as an “intellectual and social upstart.” That same year, Beecher began developing a new constituency as she urged a broader image of women’s role in American society. Her “Essay on Slavery and Abolition with Reference to the Duty of American Females” attempted to shape a unified consciousness in American women.

Unlike social reformers such as Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Beecher believed that female influence could best be utilized within the traditional family hierarchy and that this influence was at the core of national morals. Women would exemplify domestic virtues and by their superior moral sensibility would be a stabilizing force in the nation. The foundation of her future work was laid in this essay and Beecher turned to what she hoped would be a lucrative literary career.

Beecher wrote copiously, but only one book, published in Boston in 1841, gave her the financial base she craved. By 1843, her Treatise on Domestic Economy was in its fourth printing and it gave her access to a national audience. Her book intended to give women a sense of purpose, of mission: the formation of the moral and intellectual character of the young. Beecher saw that women needed specialized training for this mission. She stressed that, because of their service to others, women needed more education that would be specially tailored to prepare them for this responsibility.

Glorifying domesticity, Beecher assured women that they were engaged in “the greatest work that was ever committed to human responsibility.” Women’s subordinate status, Beecher stated, was not imposed by nature; rather, it was necessary to promote the general welfare. Domesticity knew no boundaries and therefore could be a focus for a new, unified national identity. Beecher intended to transcend divisions between women of different social classes by emphasizing the universality of domestic values as she built on traditional distinctions between the sex roles.

Women were uniquely able to be constructive agents of social change. The home, therefore, was not a place of isolation but rather a base from which to influence all of society. Beecher’s reasoning was particularly comforting to a nation undergoing dramatic changes, as it did not require elimination of the traditional male prerogatives.

Beecher’s treatise was published by Harper and Brothers after 1842, ensuring it national distribution. Reprinted almost every year from 1841 to 1856, it became Beecher’s best-selling work. Previously, women had to read separate books on health, childcare, cooking, and general well-being. The treatise pulled together all the domestic arts, giving simple rules for resolving the contradictions and ambiguities of daily life.

With the continuing popularity of the treatise, Beecher’s career entered a second phase in which she founded and directed the American Woman’s Education Association, which was to aid in the establishment of numerous women’s schools. Traveling widely during the 1840’s and 1850’s, she helped define women’s potential both within and outside the home, though primarily the former.

The last two decades of Beecher’s life were given to extensive travel, fund-raising, promotion of her books, and publicizing women’s education. A major focus was the founding of colleges in the West to train women for professions as teachers and homemakers. The American Woman’s Education Association (founded in New York in 1852) was a source of educational funding; although it helped raise respectable sums of money, the association did not meet all of Beecher’s needs or expectations. For this she relied on private help, especially from well-to-do relatives and longtime friends. Beecher continued her efforts on behalf of women’s education until her death in May, 1878.

Significance

Catharine Beecher’s last years were active ones, attending teachers’ conventions, keeping up a wide correspondence, and giving public lectures. Based in the East again, Beecher lived with her siblings’ families on and off, becoming closest to Harriet Beecher Stowe . She continued to travel and write on behalf of women teachers, even after the disbanding of the American Woman’s Education Association in 1862.

With Harriet, Catharine coauthored The American Woman’s Home in 1869, a sequel to the Treatise on Domestic Economy. It repeated much of that first book while emphasizing the family as a model of how society should function: in harmonious social interdependence. The post-Civil War years saw an urgent need for such a model because society was experiencing much change at a rapid pace. Catharine Beecher argued that an expanding democracy needed the stability provided by families supporting one another—parents and children sacrificing themselves for the good of all. In her schema, men were also tied into domesticity, although women were to be the chief ministers.

Above all, the Treatise on Domestic Economy assured Beecher’s reputation and place in history. In it she asserted women’s active role in society, according them a greater degree of dignity and respect than had been theirs. The keystone of her programs and policies was the promotion of a superior education for all females. She helped enlarge the world and role of women, offering strategies for autonomous growth. Catharine Beecher’s vision of strong womanhood added much to the expansion of nineteenth century feminism.

Bibliography

Barker-Benfield, Graham J., and Catherine Clinton. Portraits of American Women. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. A history of gender roles and relations from the period of early settlement to the 1980’s. Gives a broad scope of social history. One succinct chapter on Catharine Beecher.

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975. An excellent overview of the women’s rights movement. Chapter 11, “Early Stages Toward Equal Education,” is very helpful.

Kerber, Linda K., and Jane S. DeHart, eds. Women’s America. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. A collection of essays on women and their roles from 1600-1990. Selections in part 2 provide excellent background for Beecher’s thinking and experiences. Includes one essay on Beecher’s educational efforts in the West.

Parker, Gail T., ed. The Oven Birds: American Women on Womanhood, 1820-1920. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972. An anthology of women’s writings. A lengthy excellent introduction, situating each woman in her era, relating themes and experiences. Two excerpts are included from Beecher’s Woman Suffrage and Woman’s Profession, published in 1871.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. An analytical study of Beecher and her times. Very thorough on her writings. Detailed chapter notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Tonkovich, Nicole. Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Examines the work of four nineteenth century women writers, including Beecher. Tonkovich points out the conflict between the women’s nonfiction, in which they preached a life of ideal domesticity for women, and their lives, which were lived outside the traditional domestic world.

Tyler, Alice Felt. Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944. Reprint. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. Traces the crusades, reforms, and reformers in U.S. society from colonial times to the Civil War. Especially helpful are chapter 2 on “Evangelical Religion” and chapter 10 on “Education and the American Faith.” Bibliography, chapter notes, and index.

White, Barbara A. The Beecher Sisters. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Joint biography of Catharine, her sisters, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Isabel, an outspoken liberal and leader in the women’s movement.

Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. Examines main themes of women’s history in given eras by reference to particular lives. Connects public and private spheres and women’s strategies, individual and collective, as agents of change. Chapter 6, “Promoting Women’s Sphere, 1800-1860,” is particularly useful.