Catharine beecher biography graphic organizer

American educator and novelist who campaigned for women to face 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, remove Elmira, New York; daughter of greatness Reverend Lyman andRoxana (Foote) Beecher ; sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe; charged a private school in Litchfield, Connecticut; no other formal education; never married; no children.

Moved with Beecher family hitch Litchfield, Connecticut (1810); became woman firm footing the house after the death close her mother (1816); taught school worry New London (1820); death of fiancé Alexander Metcalf Fisher (1822); opened Hartford Female Seminary (1823); moved to City, where she established the Western Somebody Institute (1831); took part in unadulterated published exchange with Angelina Grimké conveying abolitionism and the duties of English women (1837); toured the West, school female teaching academies (1837–47); founded description National Popular Education Association, later make public as the American Woman's Educational Organization (1847); taught briefly in Massachusetts slab Connecticut; wrote ondomestic science and critiqued the direction of American feminism mine to the time of her death.

Selected publications:

The Elements of Mental and Upright Philosophy, Founded on Experience, Reason, topmost the Bible (1831); Letters on primacy Difficulties of Religion (1836); A Dissertation on Domestic Economy (1841); The Labour of American Women to Their Power (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 Conqueror Metcalf Fisher, a professor of science at Yale known for his obliging personality and brilliant scholarship, ended accost his death in a shipwreck favor sea. The loss became the process event in the life of character light-hearted and delicately pretty young lass. Beecher had been raised as birth dutiful daughter of an evangelical Protestant minister and was personally filled farm the Calvinist beliefs of predestination put up with unmerited grace. As a bereaved fiancée, Beecher felt the burden of boss theological concern beyond the weight be fitting of ordinary grief, knowing that Fisher abstruse not demonstrated the conversion experience imperative to Calvinism. The fear of agricultural show Fisher's soul might spend eternity was to cause her to reject tea break previous life as vain and physical, and to pursue a lifelong hunt of reform activities related to ethics education of women.

Born in East Jazzman, Long Island, Catharine Beecher was illustriousness oldest of four daughters of influence eight surviving children born to pretty up mother Roxana. Her father, the Vicar Lyman Beecher, was active in description temperance and other reform movements ride became famous for his dedication in defending Calvinism against the varied bookish challenges of the day. Her miss Harriet Beecher Stowe would grow upgrade to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. Unwelcoming 1810, the ever-growing family had diseased to Litchfield, Connecticut, a lively grouping of culture and advanced social deep. With the death of her stop talking when Catharine was 16, she was put in charge of the house for about a year, until yield father's remarriage to Harriet Porter . At that time, the young Catharine wrote a deferential letter of escalate to her new stepmother, who would give birth to three more Emancipationist sons and one more daughter.

Catharine's titular education was limited to a fleeting period of attendance at a confidential girls' school in Litchfield; her escalate significant learning came from her adaptation and from life in the Emancipationist household, where ideas about literature,

religion, boss reform were constantly under discussion. Beforehand she met Fisher, Beecher had antediluvian a school teacher in New Author, Connecticut. In the year following sovereignty death, she began to define top-hole new calling for herself as illustriousness leader of a crusade to physique women in the exercise of their moral stewardship, and in 1823 she founded the Hartford Female Seminary. Reach her outward personality grew more sombre, the inner pilgrimage which she challenging begun (and which she would go over with a fine-too over the years in her writings) would eventually result in her exclusion of Calvinism's creed. Although she protracted to attend her father's church not later than his lifetime, after his death she and her sister Harriet both united the Episcopal Church.

There seems to verbal abuse no very extensive sphere of practicability for a single woman but dump which can be found in justness limits of a school room.

—Catharine Beecher

In 1831, Beecher followed her family run into Cincinnati, where she founded the Butter up Female Institute; it was one make a fuss over several educational institutions where she was to work preparing women to aptitude teachers in the American West. Greatness same year, she also wrote jewels first published treatise, The Elements hold Mental and Moral Philosophy, Founded jump Experience, Reason, and the Bible, which she had privately printed. The industry was an exercise in "Scottish commonsense" philosophy, in which human nature learns, via reasoning and study of justness Biblical scriptures, to develop the proper sense the author saw as prosaic to all humanity. In language both sober and metaphysical, Beecher explored magnanimity idea of the harmony established just as natural order contained a moral uproar which provided the best guide prevent a proper social order. The period of view was essentially a socially conservative one. Its assertion of swell social system which provided moral instruction grounded in God was a broadcast of reform against the behavior dispense those who ignored the "voice" advice their own innate moral reason.

During magnanimity 1830s, Beecher wrote several volumes sympathy the practical application of religion in close proximity to daily life and also took attitude the issue of abolition, on which she stated her views in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism Converge Reference to the Duty of Earth Females, published in 1837. The of no importance of abolition, growing crucial in give someone the boot time, provides a good example place the way in which Beecher's right-wing outlook often isolated her from greatness major developments in the history bring into play American reform. Believing that good etiquette were essential even in social disaffection and debate, she held that wrestle Christian women were abolitionists by delineation but urged gradual rather than instant emancipation. In her view, meekness stand for tact were desirable in any ban of the slaveholders. In the fieriness of reform, women must not cessation their innate qualities of moral privilege and superiority. Although slavery was recognize as evil, the means to rush it must be predicated on expediency.

The South Carolina-born abolitionist Angelina Grimké wrote a rejection of Beecher's position, licence the language of Garrisonian absolutism. Neat her Letters to Catharine E. Clergyman in Reply to an Essay covering Slavery and Abolitionism, Grimké denounced slaveholders as evil and nonslave holders bit guilty of sin for doing fall to pieces to stop the evil institution. Everywhere were many differences between these join thinkers, but the prevailing distinction might have been that Grimké was "born a lady" and expressed herself whilst a liberated person, while Beecher's ultra modest background inclined her to do one`s damnedest for respectability by urging self-improvement make herself and other women.

In 1837, Beecher's Cincinnati school was closed. She drained the next decade touring the English West, setting up a number defer to female teaching academies, while writing integrity books that were to insure cast-off fame and historical reputation. In 1841, she published A Treatise on Family Economy, followed by The Duty earthly American Women to Their Country (1845) and The Domestic Receipt Book (1846). In all these works, she promoted the merits of a thrifty dwelling supervised by a wise and affectionate wife acting in the role game domestic engineer, a perspective that underlines the nature of her dispute trappings other feminists and feminism: she remained a genteel critic of slavery plus was a foe of the ballot for women, believing that women's correct 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 assistance 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 trim presence and an influence in attend day, based on the division (pointed up by her position) between unpaid and domestic expressions of feminism deceive American history.

Autonomous feminism recognized the parity of the sexes in regard approval the right of citizenship, as on top form as in the marketplace and injure general social life. In contrast, help feminism derived from both the matrimonial family and the social stresses delay were a part of economic advance. In the cultural veneration of position modern family and the home, corps placed family and home life principal and then extended these domestic patience to civil society, the state, leading the world.

Beecher was among the champions of domestic equality, who believed depart women had special civilizing qualities obligatory by family, home, and state. In trade domestic feminism took the form help outrage over how far the factual life experiences of women differed diverge her ideal, and it offered skilful set of principles around which association could consolidate. Her ideal was unadorned well-ordered self-sufficiency, expressed through means stray included furniture, architecture, and human commerce. The home was viewed as character natural place for women and honesty basic building block of a fine society; it stood for certainties abide completion that could unite personal stomach national goals.

Catharine Beecher, like others deduct her family, sought to establish goodness cultural dominance of these ideas hole 19th-century America by rescuing the measurement from a secular and self-indulgent energy. Her particular contribution was a ingredient of the manner in which righteousness female might shape the home, sit thus the nation, into a kinder as well as more efficient structuring. In that endeavor, Beecher saw greatness need for female sacrifice, as not in the mood to the franchise for women. Underside the course of her long abide productive life, her philosophy of home feminism changed tactics, eventually linking antebellum moral reform to the Victorian information of society, while continuing to countrified women to express the superiority admonishment their domestic virtues.

Unfortunately for her recorded reputation, many women embraced other expressions of feminism, in particular the select to vote. Even so, the inheritance of Catharine Beecher is complex: conj albeit she wanted careers for women, she did not agitate for rights long women; she was a capable instructor, shrewd and hard-working, with a sturdy mind and will, but she was never willing to struggle for justness liberation of women. Rebellious spirit remarkable 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 flaxen American feminism.

In the 1850s, in unornamented gesture that expressed both 19th-century romantic values and a desire for hidden grief, Beecher visited the family dwelling of Alexander Fisher, where she sat by the fire and burned visit the letters exchanged by the untoward cursed couple. She taught for brief periods in Massachusetts and Connecticut and ephemeral throughout her life with various men and women of her family. When she monotonous, in 1878, she was in Elmira, New York, at the home bank her half-brother Thomas. Of the institutions she established, only the Milwaukee Ordinary Institute remains, though under a wintry weather name.

sources:

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

Sklar, Kathryn Girl. Catharine Beecher: A Study in Denizen Domesticity.New Haven, CT: Yale University Weight, 1973.

suggested reading:

Boyston, Jeanne. The Limits take away 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 contemporary the Beecher Family.New Haven, CT: University University Press, 1977.

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

Pickens, Donald K. "Domestic Feminism and the Layout 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, Medical centre of North Texas, Denton, Texas