BEECHER, CATHARINE

(1800-1878), educator and writer. Older sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, and eldest child of Lyman Beecher, Catharine Beecher in the 1840s was the best-known member of her large and prodigiously active family. Her life was shaped by the same issues that governed theirs: the transformation of American religious life from Puritan to evangelical values, the national crisis over slavery, western migration and settlement, and profound changes in middle-class American domestic life.

Resisting her father's powerful religious influence, Beecher directed her creativity into more secular channels. Yet throughout her long career as an educator of women, an advocate for the feminization of the teaching profession, and a publicist for women's power in family life, she invoked religious sanctions for the innovations she promoted.

Beecher never really enjoyed teaching, but like many American women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—especially those who did not marry—she used it as a means of obtaining economic independence and as a route to other forms of social influence. For example, her first school, Hartford Female Seminary, became well known for its stirring religious revivals in the 1820s, which Beecher herself helped lead. Her success as an educator reflected the enormous increase in common schooling that accompanied the tremendous growth in American population and its geographic expansion during the first half of the nineteenth century. Although the main reason women replaced men as teachers in the nation's common schools was their willingness to work for lower wages, Beecher's writings, such as An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers (1835) and The Duty of American Women to Their Country (1845), turned necessity into a virtue by extolling the superior ability of women teachers to produce moral citizens.

Catharine Beecher also became well known as a commentator on changes taking place in middle-class American family life. She expanded her constituency beyond the schoolroom to the parlor with such writings as Letters to Persons Who Are Engaged in Domestic Service (1842), The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children: The Causes and the Remedy (1846), The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Women (1851), Letters to the People on Health and Happiness (1855), and, above all, her often reprinted Treatise on Domestic Economy (1843). Her name became synonymous with the expansion of women's power within the domestic sphere. Some scholars have called this "domestic feminism," since it advocated women's control of their bodies and their immediate life circumstances. Predictably, she opposed women's activism in the public domain, particularly in the antislavery movement.

A complex figure embodying many internal contradictions, Beecher, as a single woman, exemplified the possibilities for personal autonomy available in the nineteenth century to women who never married. Yet despite all her domestic advice, and despite her effort to construct a retirement home on the campus of a school she founded in Milwaukee, she was never able to maintain a home of her own. This rendered her autonomy problematic for her and for the family members with whom she lived. Nevertheless, within these constraints Catharine Beecher helped her contemporaries see new social and political significance in women's talents as teachers and homemakers.

Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis, eds., The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere (1988); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (1973; paperback ed., 1976).

Kathryn Kish Sklar

See also Education.