Catharine Beecher

Written By Daisy Zeijlon

Written by Daisy Zeijlon

 
 

b. September 6, 1800 | d. May 12, 1878 

Catharine Beecher was one of the earliest and most prominent domestic advisors of the nineteenth century, whose work shaped the domestic science movement’s complicated–and often contradictory–views on motherhood.

 

Bio

Born in East Hampton, New York to Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher and Roxana Beecher, Catharine Beecher was one of thirteen siblings, all of whom were active authors, reformers and religious leaders. Beecher herself was a passionate educator and prolific writer. It was her steadfast belief that a woman’s most important role was mother, and that women should prepare rigorously for it in the same way that men train for professional work (James, Leavitt). To that end she founded her first women’s school, the Hartford Female Seminary, in 1823 and went on to establish further similar institutions in Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois. Her curricula included some literary studies but focused primarily on practical skills including housekeeping, child rearing and thrift (Burstyn). She wrote about these same subjects in her most famous work, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, published in 1841. A Treatise was just one of the more than two dozen books Beecher published in her lifetime, alongside countless articles for journals, newspapers and women’s magazines. Like many of her peers, by the time she died she had stirred up controversy as a staunch opponent of early feminism. Still, she has remained one of the faces of domestic science’s origins: to this day, her books are regularly reprinted. 

Unlike many of the other women featured in this project, Catharine Beecher’s outsized role in the domestic science movement has not been overlooked. Rather than spotlighting her contributions to the field, this profile seeks to complicate her most significant legacy of defining modern American motherhood. 

A Sacred Vocation

Beecher’s stance on motherhood was empowering. She considered it both a sacred and patriotic vocation (James). Mothers had the responsibility and opportunity to lead the moral development of the next generation (Gardner), which was of particular importance after the disruption of the Civil War. Women and women alone were capable of doing this work: Beecher saw men for their financial and biological contributions to family life but considered them incapable of the rigors of parenting, which should be left to women (Gardner). In fact, Beecher was amongst the first women to publicly define motherhood as hard work, and she dedicated her life to professionalizing it. There was no reason, she believed, that women’s labor inside the home should not be valued as highly as men’s public work. This belief, in the immense and unique power of women to raise America’s children, became a foundational principle of the domestic science movement. 

Beecher also employed a surprisingly expansive and progressive definition of motherhood. Any woman, she believed, could and should mother children, regardless of whether or not the children in her life were her own (Walden). While women’s role was not necessarily to birth them it was to raise them, which is why Beecher especially advocated for women to become teachers (Gardner). She developed, for example, a robust program with the Board of National Popular Education to bring 500 women school teachers from the Northeast to the western frontier states where formalized education in the mid-nineteenth century was sparse (James). Beecher was also a teacher herself, working in classrooms throughout her career and publishing myriad math, geography and physiology textbooks (Burstyn). This work may have been how she personally reconciled an understudied contradiction that many domestic scientists embodied: she did not have children but argued that childlessness was a sin.

A Lonely Burden

At the same time, by imbuing caretaking with such consequence Beecher placed a tremendous pressure on mothers. In The Duty of American Women to Their Country (1845)—whose title is suggestive of Beecher’s generally evangelical tone—she wrote that neglecting children would lead to anarchy (James). This perspective is a punishing one in that it holds mothers responsible for preserving national order. It is also a lonely one: in her work Beecher often assigned the country’s emerging ideology of individualism to motherhood. Indeed, she was an originator of nineteenth-century “manual mania”: the midcentury period in which the popularity of domestic self-help books exploded (Walden). Beecher produced guides on everything from how to design homes to how to cook healthful family meals, which meant that women could easily find all the tools they needed to be excellent caretakers without relying on outside help. Put simply, this abundance of resources meant that there was no excuse for failure. 

Intensive Mothering

In historical analysis it can be difficult to avoid the temptation to compare past with present, but here it seems hard to avoid. In Beecher’s construction of motherhood, we see whispers of twenty-first century intensive mothering: a modern phenomenon which urges mothers to derive their identities and sense of purpose solely from their children (Collins). Women are expected to self sacrifice in a way that that men are not, and to find joy in this forfeiture. For Beecher, one of these sacrifices was the right to vote: she believed so fiercely in the power of women’s domestic authority that she did not want women entering the political arena to distract from it. 

Sources

Daisy Zeijlon
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