Catharine Beecher

Catharine Beecher (born September 6, 1800, East Hampton, New York, U.S.—died May 12, 1878, Elmira, New York) was an American educator and author who popularized and shaped a conservative ideological movement to both elevate and entrench women’s place in the domestic sphere of American culture.

Beecher was the eldest daughter in one of the most remarkable families of the 19th century. She was the daughter of Lyman Beecher as well as the sister of Edward and Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe and the half sister of Isabella Beecher Hooker, to name only the most prominent of her siblings. She grew up in an atmosphere of learning but, because she was female, did not receive much formal education. From 1810 she lived in Litchfield, Connecticut, where she attended schools for young ladies while independently studying Latin, philosophy, and mathematics. After the death of her mother in 1816 she had much of the care of the family. In 1821 she became a schoolteacher, and in 1823 she and her sister Mary established a girls’ school that four years later became the Hartford Female Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, an innovative institution in which, for example, she introduced calisthenics in a course of physical education.

Moving with her father to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1832, Beecher opened the Western Female Institute; financial difficulties and her precarious health closed the school five years later. The rest of her life was devoted to the development of educational facilities in the Midwest and to the promotion of equal educational opportunities for women. She worked through the Board of National Popular Education (1847–48), a private agency headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1852 founded the American Woman’s Educational Association to recruit and train teachers to staff schools on the frontier. She inspired the founding of several women’s colleges in the Midwest, and her writings did much to introduce domestic science into the American school curriculum.

Beecher was most influential as a writer. Her major work, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, first published in 1841, went through 15 editions and was the first American work to deal with all facets of domestic life. The Treatise helped to standardize domestic practices and reinforce domestic values, arguing that a woman’s proper role was in the home, where she could powerfully affect American society. Beecher’s other publications include “Female Education” (1827), The Duty of American Women to Their Country (1845), Common Sense Applied to Religion (1857), and, with Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869).