Who is catherine beecher

Her abolitionist views were not popular in an area divided on the issue of slavery. She then turned to working on the famous McGuffey readers, the first nationally adopted textbooks for elementary students. In this essay, she began to formulate her idea that women could have a powerful influence by creating a virtuous and harmonious home life.

To encourage the spread of these ideas, Beecher published a number of books providing guidance and praise for domestic life, such as her extremely popular Treatise on Domestic Economy This was a practical and moral guide to domestic life on such topics as cooking, child rearing and general health care — a single source of household knowledge that had not existed before.

The book was an incredible success, earning her national fame. According to Beecher, the mission of all women should be to form the moral and intellectual character of children, and in order to fulfill that duty, women required a quality education. Through nurturing and teaching, women could use their home life as a base from which to create change in the rest of society. Her support of the family and social hierarchy made Beecher a celebrity. From then on, Beecher traveled between homes of family and friends, supporting herself with lectures and books.

The Duty of American Women to Their Country argued for free public education to protect the still-new democracy. At the same time, Beecher also expanded the definition of education to include what was later termed home economics. Beyond cooking, cleaning and other work, her definition of essential household knowledge also included the maintenance of good health.

During this time, Catherine also was an active proponent for the creation of more schools for women. She might have been aware that had she been a boy, she would have joined her brothers in the clergy.

Because she could not do that, she became an unofficial preacher to women. In the last years of her life, Beecher returned to the East, where she lived with various relatives. Although she could be considered elderly in the s and s, Beecher returned briefly to teaching, probably seeking both income and an established position. She suffered numerous nervous collapses and was a patient in more than a dozen sanitariums during her lifetime, probably because of the repression of her abilities that society imposed on her.

Catherine Beecher died at age 77 on May 12, , while living with her brother Thomas in Elmira, New York; she is buried there. Although she did not challenge the subordinate place of females, she did present a new vision of women as a strong and influential force that helped to determine the direction and conscience of the nation.

If all females were not only well educated themselves but were prepared to communicate in an easy manner their stores of knowledge to others; if they not only knew how to regulate their own minds, tempers and habits but how to effect improvements in those around them, the face of society would be speedily changed.

It is to mothers and to teachers that the world is to look for the character which is to be enstamped on each succeeding generation, for it is to them that the great business of education is almost exclusively committed. And will it not appear by examination that neither mothers nor teachers have ever been properly educated for their profession?

Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home What was Catharine Beecher known for? Ben Davis May 29, What was Catharine Beecher known for? What did Catharine Beecher do for education? What did Lyman Beecher do?

When was Catharine born? Where is Catherine Beecher from? What did Catherine Beecher base arguments? Who founded the Hartford Female Seminary? Like many young ladies at the time, Catharine, who was born in , spent the first ten years of her life being educated at home. Later, her parents sent her to private school in Connecticut, but she was dissatisfied with the curriculum.

Subjects like mathematics, philosophy, and Latin were not available in girls' schools , so Catharine learned these on her own. After her mother died in , Catharine returned home and took over the running of her father's household and supervision of her younger siblings; a few years later she began working as a teacher.

By the time she was 23, she and her sister Mary had opened the Hartford Female Seminary to provide educational opportunities for girls. Catharine believed that it was important for women to be well-educated, so she taught herself all sorts of subjects that she could then pass along to her students.

She learned Latin from her brother Edward, the headmaster of another school in Hartford, and studied chemistry, algebra, and rhetoric. She presented the novel idea that young women could learn all of these subjects from a single teacher, and soon her school was in high demand. She also believed that ladies benefited from physical activity, which was a revolutionary concept. Catharine disdained the poor health that was brought on by tight corsets and poor diets, so she developed a calisthenics plan for her students.

She soon began writing about her curriculum, to serve as a guide for other teachers. As her students grew up and moved on, Catharine shifted her focus to the roles that they would eventually play in society. Although she strongly believed that child-rearing and running the domestic aspects of a home were a source of pride for women, she also felt that women were entitled to respect and responsibility outside of their roles as wives and mothers. Her goal was to educate women so they could become teachers, which had traditionally been a male-dominated profession.

Catharine, who never married, saw women as natural teachers, with education as an extension of their roles as the guides of domestic home life. Because more men were leaving the world of education to go into industry, training women as teachers was a perfect solution.

After a few years, she closed the school due to a lack of public support. The Beechers were not popular in Cincinnati because of their anti-enslavement views, and in Catharine wrote and published Slavery and Abolition with Reference to the Duty of American Females. In this treatise, she argued that women needed to stay out of the anti-enslavement movement because of the potential for violence, and instead needed to focus on creating moral and harmonious home lives for their husbands and children.

This, she believed, would give women power and influence. Her work A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School , published in , promoted the responsibility of girls' schools to teach not only intellectual pursuits, but also physical activity and moral guidance.