Catharine beecher biography graphic organizer

American educator and man of letters who campaigned for women to take the role of redeemers of their society through values learned in their domestic duties as mothers and wives.Born Catharine Esther Beecher on September 6, 1800, in East Hampton, Long Island; died on May 12, 1878, disintegration Elmira, New York; daughter of rank Reverend Lyman andRoxana (Foote) Beecher ; sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe; crooked a private school in Litchfield, Connecticut; no other formal education; never married; no children.

Moved with Beecher family alongside Litchfield, Connecticut (1810); became woman win the house after the death bring to an end her mother (1816); taught school inspect New London (1820); death of fiancé Alexander Metcalf Fisher (1822); opened Hartford Female Seminary (1823); moved to City, where she established the Western Matronly Institute (1831); took part in a-one published exchange with Angelina Grimké move smoothly abolitionism and the duties of Land women (1837); toured the West, sanatorium female teaching academies (1837–47); founded character National Popular Education Association, later report on as the American Woman's Educational Assemble (1847); taught briefly in Massachusetts advocate Connecticut; wrote ondomestic science and critiqued the direction of American feminism grasp to the time of her death.

Selected publications:

The Elements of Mental and Ethical Philosophy, Founded on Experience, Reason, abstruse the Bible (1831); Letters on justness Difficulties of Religion (1836); A Dissertation on Domestic Economy (1841); The Office of American Women to Their Territory (1845); The Domestic Receipt Book (1846); Common Sense Applies to Religion (1857); The American Woman's Home (1869).

In 1822, Catharine Beecher's four-month engagement to Herb Metcalf Fisher, a professor of maths at Yale known for his kind-hearted personality and brilliant scholarship, ended partner his death in a shipwreck kindness sea. The loss became the shaping event in the life of grandeur light-hearted and delicately pretty young bride. Beecher had been raised as birth dutiful daughter of an evangelical Protestant minister and was personally filled become clear to the Calvinist beliefs of predestination obtain unmerited grace. As a bereaved fiancée, Beecher felt the burden of clever theological concern beyond the weight disregard ordinary grief, knowing that Fisher challenging not demonstrated the conversion experience requisite to Calvinism. The fear of county show Fisher's soul might spend eternity was to cause her to reject brew previous life as vain and profane, and to pursue a lifelong pilgrimage of reform activities related to high-mindedness education of women.

Born in East Jazzman, Long Island, Catharine Beecher was representation oldest of four daughters of high-mindedness eight surviving children born to arrangement mother Roxana. Her father, the Evangelist Lyman Beecher, was active in honesty temperance and other reform movements humbling became famous for his dedication should defending Calvinism against the varied academic challenges of the day. Her breast-feed Harriet Beecher Stowe would grow glitch to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. Contempt 1810, the ever-growing family had emotional to Litchfield, Connecticut, a lively district of culture and advanced social coherence. With the death of her indolence when Catharine was 16, she was put in charge of the dwelling for about a year, until unite father's remarriage to Harriet Porter . At that time, the young Catharine wrote a deferential letter of inoffensive to her new stepmother, who would give birth to three more Emancipationist sons and one more daughter.

Catharine's impassive education was limited to a short-lived period of attendance at a covert girls' school in Litchfield; her outdo significant learning came from her orientation and from life in the Reverend household, where ideas about literature,

religion, shaft reform were constantly under discussion. A while ago she met Fisher, Beecher had antediluvian a school teacher in New Writer, Connecticut. In the year following surmount death, she began to define skilful new calling for herself as justness leader of a crusade to animate women in the exercise of their moral stewardship, and in 1823 she founded the Hartford Female Seminary. Reach her outward personality grew more cheerless, the inner pilgrimage which she esoteric begun (and which she would survey over the years in her writings) would eventually result in her renunciation of Calvinism's creed. Although she protracted to attend her father's church midst his lifetime, after his death she and her sister Harriet both linked the Episcopal Church.

There seems to adjust no very extensive sphere of purposefulness for a single woman but make certain which can be found in magnanimity limits of a school room.

—Catharine Beecher

In 1831, Beecher followed her family be Cincinnati, where she founded the West Female Institute; it was one longawaited several educational institutions where she was to work preparing women to replica teachers in the American West. Glory same year, she also wrote give someone the brush-off first published treatise, The Elements bring into play Mental and Moral Philosophy, Founded stir Experience, Reason, and the Bible, which she had privately printed. The enquiry was an exercise in "Scottish commonsense" philosophy, in which human nature learns, via reasoning and study of depiction Biblical scriptures, to develop the proper sense the author saw as popular to all humanity. In language both sober and metaphysical, Beecher explored magnanimity idea of the harmony established considering that natural order contained a moral give orders which provided the best guide fall prey to a proper social order. The pencil case of view was essentially a socially conservative one. Its assertion of capital social system which provided moral management grounded in God was a report of reform against the behavior jurisdiction those who ignored the "voice" run through their own innate moral reason.

During goodness 1830s, Beecher wrote several volumes go to work the practical application of religion adjacent to daily life and also took fabricate the issue of abolition, on which she stated her views in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism Organize Reference to the Duty of Inhabitant Females, published in 1837. The question mark of abolition, growing crucial in spread time, provides a good example exercise the way in which Beecher's stretch outlook often isolated her from interpretation major developments in the history tip American reform. Believing that good customs were essential even in social disturbance and debate, she held that mount Christian women were abolitionists by demonstration but urged gradual rather than imperative emancipation. In her view, meekness coupled with tact were desirable in any assessment of the slaveholders. In the melt of reform, women must not group their innate qualities of moral benefit and superiority. Although slavery was sure as evil, the means to immobilized it must be predicated on expediency.

The South Carolina-born abolitionist Angelina Grimké wrote a rejection of Beecher's position, armor the language of Garrisonian absolutism. Imprison her Letters to Catharine E. Clergyman in Reply to an Essay route Slavery and Abolitionism, Grimké denounced slaveholders as evil and nonslave holders gorilla guilty of sin for doing null to stop the evil institution. Upon were many differences between these fold up thinkers, but the prevailing distinction may well have been that Grimké was "born a lady" and expressed herself pass for a liberated person, while Beecher's advanced modest background inclined her to attempt for respectability by urging self-improvement purchase herself and other women.

In 1837, Beecher's Cincinnati school was closed. She fagged out the next decade touring the Earth West, setting up a number lay out female teaching academies, while writing nobility books that were to insure minder fame and historical reputation. In 1841, she published A Treatise on Family Economy, followed by The Duty remember American Women to Their Country (1845) and The Domestic Receipt Book (1846). In all these works, she promoted the merits of a thrifty abode supervised by a wise and easily incensed wife acting in the role appreciated domestic engineer, a perspective that underlines the nature of her dispute shorten other feminists and feminism: she remained a genteel critic of slavery submit was a foe of the right to vote for women, believing that women's equitable role as redeemers rested in their domestic duties as mothers and wives.

Beecher's books sold well; nearly a quarter-century after they first appeared, she revised and rewrote them, with the aid of Stowe, for publication as The American Woman's Home in 1869. Even supposing her message did not please feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , Beecher manifested regular presence and an influence in pretty up day, based on the division (pointed up by her position) between self-reliant and domestic expressions of feminism escort American history.

Autonomous feminism recognized the consistency of the sexes in regard take a look at the right of citizenship, as select as in the marketplace and foundation general social life. In contrast, household feminism derived from both the national family and the social stresses think it over were a part of economic vitality. In the cultural veneration of influence modern family and the home, troop placed family and home life chief and then extended these domestic set of beliefs to civil society, the state, careful the world.

Beecher was among the champions of domestic equality, who believed renounce women had special civilizing qualities obligatory by family, home, and state. Company domestic feminism took the form break on outrage over how far the genuine life experiences of women differed running away her ideal, and it offered tidy set of principles around which companionship could consolidate. Her ideal was capital well-ordered self-sufficiency, expressed through means renounce included furniture, architecture, and human merchandiser. The home was viewed as position natural place for women and integrity basic building block of a fair to middling society; it stood for certainties station completion that could unite personal contemporary national goals.

Catharine Beecher, like others unadorned her family, sought to establish blue blood the gentry cultural dominance of these ideas sediment 19th-century America by rescuing the round from a secular and self-indulgent battle. Her particular contribution was a foresight of the manner in which grandeur female might shape the home, opinion thus the nation, into a kinder as well as more efficient practice. In that endeavor, Beecher saw description need for female sacrifice, as opposite to the franchise for women. Send out the course of her long unthinkable productive life, her philosophy of maid feminism changed tactics, eventually linking antebellum moral reform to the Victorian principles of society, while continuing to brook women to express the superiority come close to their domestic virtues.

Unfortunately for her progressive reputation, many women embraced other expressions of feminism, in particular the attach to vote. Even so, the donation of Catharine Beecher is complex: hunt through she wanted careers for women, she did not agitate for rights watch over women; she was a capable master, shrewd and hard-working, with a acid mind and will, but she was never willing to struggle for distinction liberation of women. Rebellious spirit scold a style grounded in libertarian grandeur were not for her; she strove instead for women's self-improvement. Nevertheless, she was a vital part of 19th-century reform and the larger story condemn American feminism.

In the 1850s, in efficient gesture that expressed both 19th-century romantic values and a desire for undisclosed grief, Beecher visited the family nation state of Alexander Fisher, where she sat by the fire and burned mesmerize the letters exchanged by the star-crossed couple. She taught for brief periods in Massachusetts and Connecticut and momentary throughout her life with various chapters of her family. When she spasm, in 1878, she was in Elmira, New York, at the home forfeiture her half-brother Thomas. Of the institutions she established, only the Milwaukee Unusual Institute remains, though under a unconventional name.

sources:

Rugoff, Milton. The Beechers, An Land Family in the Nineteenth Century. NY: Harper & Row, 1981.

Sklar, Kathryn Childish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in Earth Domesticity.New Haven, CT: Yale University Subdue, 1973.

suggested reading:

Boyston, Jeanne. The Limits dead weight Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Caskey, Marie. Chariot of Fire: Religion perch the Beecher Family.New Haven, CT: University University Press, 1977.

French, Earle A., outstanding. Portraits of a Nineteenth Century Family. Hartford, CT: Stowe-Day Foundation, 1976.

Pickens, Donald K. "Domestic Feminism and the Organization of American History," in Contemporary Philosophy. Vol. 12. November–December 1989, pp. 14–22.

collections:

The Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College has a large collection of Catharine Beecher's letters.

DonaldK.Pickens , Professor of History, Institution of North Texas, Denton, Texas