Dictionary of Literary Biography on Catharine Esther Beecher
Catharine Esther Beecher (6 September 1800-12 May 1878), author and educator, used the printed word as a weapon to advance her principles. A doer and writer, she effectively elevated the status of women, although the scope of her feminism was narrow by today's standards. Born in East Hampton, New York, the eldest child of Lyman and Roxana (Foote) Beecher, she moved with her family to Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1810. Her mother died when Catharine was sixteen, and her father's remarriage increased the already large household. Deeply attached to her father, a dynamic Congregational minister, Catharine assumed much of the responsibility for the family management. After a brief period studying at Sarah Pierce's school in Litchfield, she taught in New London, Connecticut. Her engagement to marry a Yale mathematics professor, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, ended in tragedy when he died at sea. As a result, the plain, heavy-featured, sallow-complexioned Catharine renounced worldly pursuits and devoted herself to "benevolent service." In 1823 she opened a girls' school in Hartford, later incorporated as the Hartford Female Seminary. There she inculcated her own high purposes and her belief in physical, moral and intellectual training for young women. When the family moved to Cincinnati, she established there the Western Female Institute. In 1833 she recommended McGuffey as the author of school texts for Truman and Smith, and so helped launch the famous Readers. In the Panic year of 1837 her school failed. Despite delicate health and a tendency to nervous collapses, she went forth to spread her educational doctrine in lectures and writings.
Beecher believed in equality of education for both sexes; the establishment of normal schools; the dispatch of qualified teachers from the East to the South and West. She held that women should be educated for their "natural" sphere: homemaking, teaching young children, service to the community. "Woman's distinctive profession," she wrote, "includes three departments--the training of the mind in childhood, the nursing of infants and of the sick, and all the handicrafts and management of the family state." Women, she believed, were to control all aspects of household life while men controlled the political and economic spheres. Beecher was opposed to woman suffrage and feminist advocacy of abolition, and held that women were most effective behind the scenes. Yet she fought the exploitation of women by their employers, their husbands, and the fashions of the day. Her position is succinctly expressed in a paper read at the first American Woman Suffrage Convention (1869): "The 'right object' sought is to remedy the wrongs and relieve the sufferings of great multitudes of our sex. The 'wrong mode' is that which aims to enforce by law instead of by love." Her strong will, her vigorous mind, and her earnest pen were all directed toward that "right object." Beecher's style was didactic and homiletic, but vigorous, forceful, and direct, an instrument well honed for the message she purveyed. In 1841 she published A Treatise on Domestic Economy and in 1846 The Domestic Receipt Book, for both of which she received from Harpers half the net profits. In those works she enlarged the scope of domestic economy and introduced a scientific approach previously wanting. With her more famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, she revised the Treatise on Domestic Economy as The American Woman's Home (1869), a subscription book that sold nearly 50,000 copies. The annual income from her copyrights enabled her to proselytize actively for her causes. She helped found the Board of National Popular Education and in 1852 organized the American Woman's Educational Association. Toward the end of her life she moved to Elmira, New York, where she died. Beecher lacked imagination and "believed that what she could not comprehend could not exist." Her books were her missionaries. Through them as well as through her personal crusade she helped extend national literacy, elevate the educational level of the country, and advance the economic position of women.
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