Lyman Beecher was a very influential speaker in the period after the Revolutionary War in the United States. His children followed his example, becoming public speakers in their own right, sometimes simply as ministers in the church but sometimes as very vocal writers and lecturers who attempted to sway public opinion to their cause. Catharine Beecher like her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was a formidable writer who helped change the way women were viewed in regard to employment outside the home.
The age of industrialization was upon the United States. Entrepreneurs were setting up factories to make products with newly developed machines. Farmers were becoming disenchanted with the rigors of agriculture, and were becoming factory workers. Women began to question the church’s mandate that they remain dependent on their male superiors, and were faced with making a safe home in a changing world. As the country became more industrialized, new ways of living were needed to replace old economic answers.
Catharine Beecher was born in 1800, the first of thirteen children born to Lyman Beecher. Reverend Beecher was a very influential and wealthy minister in what was to become the New York City area. He and his first wife, Roxanna were very well educated and very well read for their day and they instilled in their children a concern for truth, and tried to prepare them for a life of service to God and humanity. In the conventions of the day, they also taught them that women must be willing to be subservient to men. For the male children, this was totally agreeable. For the girls, it set up a struggle. As intelligent women raised in a household given to moral philosophy and discussions, the Beecher girls did not readily accept the notions regarding male and female inequality. Catharine spent her entire life wrestling with this problem.
Throughout her childhood educational experience, Catharine was known as a star student. She was one who didn’t have to study to do well, and she seems to have enjoyed the limelight of playwright and public prankster of her academy. The students were required to keep journals and to be willing to read these in front of groups. While many students railed against such invasion of privacy, Catharine read her thoughts freely. This probably was early training for her life as a writer, as she adjusted her communications to meet the demands of her public.
Around the age of 20, Catharine was engaged to marry a man several years her senior, Alexander Fisher. Her engagement was not entirely to her liking, and she approached it as her duty to her father and her station in life. When Fisher was killed in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland before the wedding, Catharine was genuinely sorry, but probably inwardly relieved to have escaped the marriage. She never married, nor had children, nor even had a permanent home as a normal condition of her life. She lived as a traveling lecturer, accepting the invitations of former students, friends, business associates, and community leaders to stay in their homes as a guest. These visits varied from one night to several weeks, depending on her host, and Beecher’s schedule.
After her fiancée’s death, Miss Beecher decided to try independence. At the age of twenty-three she began her first school in Hartford, Connecticut. The Hartford Female Seminary was very famous and influential in its day, existing eight years and attracting the daughters of the leaders of society. But, Catharine quickly found that operating the school was a full time job. She preferred to discuss her ideas about God, and morality, and education rather than be in the classroom, and so gave her sister Harriet the job of superintendent so that she could hob-nob with the social leaders of Hartford. In 1833 Catharine started the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati, a school that was interested not only in educating young women, but also wanted to teach moral behaviors. Catharine was the figure-head authority of the school, but Harriet did the day-to-day chore of running that school also. The Female Institute operated for four years before her controversial ideas alienated the community. Although she started another school in Burlington, Iowa in 1848, she became quickly disinterested in the operation of the institution and left it in someone else’s charge. It lasted until winter set in- all of seven months. Catharine Beecher’s contribution to the world was not the schools that she started. In each case her reputation allowed her easy income for doing what for her was a simple task: set up a school and then leave it to someone else to operate.
Catharine Beecher was important because she was a writer who reached a large audience over a long span of time. Her readers were given the benefit of a mind that questioned important ideas of the day and as she aged, they were treated to her developing convictions. As a woman, she argued with male logic taught to her by her father, the Reverend Beecher. Occasionally writing anonymously to gauge whether an idea would be considered better if thought to be coming from a man, she would not be silenced by her opponents. As a young adult, she wrote to defend her positions in religion and morality. As she aged, she developed her ideas about women and their need for education. Seeing the changing world around her- the new industrialization of the United States, the westward movement of families, the stresses of life that married women faced- she began to look for solutions for concerns that men did not even see. As a woman without spousal support, Beecher became interested in other women in her position: “What could a moral woman do to make a living?”
Beecher’s answer has had lasting implications for education ever since: women should be teachers. Interestingly enough, Beecher did not have formal training about teacher education, but she considered herself an authority on the subject. She did not have a home to operate, either, but that did not stop her from writing in 1841 one of the most successful books about housekeeping ever published, The Treatise on Domestic Economy. Even this book, often cited as so important, was not the reason for Beecher’s importance to education or to the family.
Catharine Beecher identified a changing social pattern as women began to assert their wish to be independent from men’s financial support. She not only found a suitable place of employment for women, namely the job of “teacher”, she also worked to give that lowly position a sense of new worth and responsibility. No longer was the public to be content to have their children learn their three “R’s”, now society could look to schools for moral instruction and for the development of democratic free thinkers. And coincidentally, mothers were also now to be teaching these same traits in the home so that all children would grow up to be adults of high character. In Catharine Beecher’s mind, women could and should be the moral shakers of the country. Beecher accepted the notion that women should not be in politics. She did not think that women should cast ballots at the polls: men and women were put on the earth for different reasons and it was important to not cross those natural barriers. But, male children would be taught by females- mothers and teachers- therefore, women truly would shape public policy. This was a notion that Beecher could accept.
Catharine Beecher died in 1877 after a lifetime of pushing and shoving her views onto the public’s conscience. Other women born in her lifetime carried her message forward into the twentieth century.
Beecher, C., 1841, Treatise on Domestic Economy, , Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb
Boydston, Kelley, & Margolis, 1988, The Limits of Sisterhood, University of North Carolina
Sklar, K., 1973, Catharine Beecher, Yale University
Tonkovich, N., 1997, Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller, University Press of Mississippi