SOURCE: Martin, Jane Roland. “Beecher's Homemakers.” In Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman, pp. 103-38. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Martin maintains that Catharine Beecher's theories of women's education and domestic management in Treatise on Domestic Economy strongly emphasize the importance and challenges of nineteenth-century women's domestic role, progressively placing it on the same level as men's public role.

In A Treatise on Domestic Economy, published in the United States just fifty years after A Vindication was published in England, Catharine Beecher extols the wife-mother role for which her daughters, like Wollstonecraft's, are destined.¹ The first text to systematize American domestic practice, this work sets forth the details of household maintenance, gardening, cooking, sewing, child rearing, caring for the sick, and other tasks carried out in the home. According to Kathryn Kish Sklar, Beecher's biographer, A Treatise established Beecher as...