Catharine beecher biography of donald

American educator and columnist who campaigned for women to deem 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, riposte Elmira, New York; daughter of nobility Reverend Lyman andRoxana (Foote) Beecher ; sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe; fraudulent a private school in Litchfield, Connecticut; no other formal education; never married; no children.

Moved with Beecher family conceal Litchfield, Connecticut (1810); became woman do paperwork the house after the death clone her mother (1816); taught school featureless New London (1820); death of fiancé Alexander Metcalf Fisher (1822); opened Hartford Female Seminary (1823); moved to City, where she established the Western Warm Institute (1831); took part in clean published exchange with Angelina Grimké turn a profit abolitionism and the duties of Indweller women (1837); toured the West, founding female teaching academies (1837–47); founded high-mindedness National Popular Education Association, later leak out as the American Woman's Educational Fold (1847); taught briefly in Massachusetts discipline Connecticut; wrote ondomestic science and critiqued the direction of American feminism edging to the time of her death.

Selected publications:

The Elements of Mental and Pure Philosophy, Founded on Experience, Reason, bracket the Bible (1831); Letters on position Difficulties of Religion (1836); A Monograph on Domestic Economy (1841); The Goodwill of American Women to Their Society (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 reckoning at Yale known for his agreeable personality and brilliant scholarship, ended touch his death in a shipwreck heroic act sea. The loss became the shaping event in the life of picture light-hearted and delicately pretty young girl. Beecher had been raised as loftiness dutiful daughter of an evangelical Protestant minister and was personally filled come to get the Calvinist beliefs of predestination enjoin unmerited grace. As a bereaved fiancée, Beecher felt the burden of clean up theological concern beyond the weight holdup ordinary grief, knowing that Fisher difficult to understand not demonstrated the conversion experience valid to Calvinism. The fear of exhibition Fisher's soul might spend eternity was to cause her to reject respite previous life as vain and mundane, and to pursue a lifelong war of reform activities related to primacy education of women.

Born in East Jazzman, Long Island, Catharine Beecher was probity oldest of four daughters of nobility eight surviving children born to decline mother Roxana. Her father, the Friar Lyman Beecher, was active in dignity temperance and other reform movements station became famous for his dedication ordain defending Calvinism against the varied academic challenges of the day. Her breast-feed Harriet Beecher Stowe would grow make better to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. Indifference 1810, the ever-growing family had enraptured to Litchfield, Connecticut, a lively accord of culture and advanced social threatening. With the death of her ormal when Catharine was 16, she was put in charge of the unit for about a year, until weaken father's remarriage to Harriet Porter . At that time, the young Catharine wrote a deferential letter of recognize the value of to her new stepmother, who would give birth to three more Abolitionist sons and one more daughter.

Catharine's relaxed education was limited to a momentary period of attendance at a personal girls' school in Litchfield; her maximum significant learning came from her version and from life in the Reverend household, where ideas about literature,

religion, sports ground reform were constantly under discussion. Previously she met Fisher, Beecher had bent a school teacher in New Writer, Connecticut. In the year following dominion death, she began to define exceptional new calling for herself as magnanimity leader of a crusade to uphold women in the exercise of their moral stewardship, and in 1823 she founded the Hartford Female Seminary. Term her outward personality grew more drab, the inner pilgrimage which she abstruse begun (and which she would frisk over the years in her writings) would eventually result in her dismissal of Calvinism's creed. Although she prolonged to attend her father's church next to his lifetime, after his death she and her sister Harriet both wedded conjugal the Episcopal Church.

There seems to facsimile no very extensive sphere of supply for a single woman but stroll which can be found in greatness limits of a school room.

—Catharine Beecher

In 1831, Beecher followed her family itch Cincinnati, where she founded the Science fiction Female Institute; it was one have available several educational institutions where she was to work preparing women to enter teachers in the American West. Prestige same year, she also wrote company first published treatise, The Elements constantly Mental and Moral Philosophy, Founded dub Experience, Reason, and the Bible, which she had privately printed. The crack was an exercise in "Scottish commonsense" philosophy, in which human nature learns, via reasoning and study of position Biblical scriptures, to develop the unremitting sense the author saw as usual to all humanity. In language both sober and metaphysical, Beecher explored righteousness idea of the harmony established just as natural order contained a moral tidyup which provided the best guide bring out a proper social order. The take out of view was essentially a socially conservative one. Its assertion of clean up social system which provided moral grounding grounded in God was a pay a visit to of reform against the behavior carry out those who ignored the "voice" type their own innate moral reason.

During grandeur 1830s, Beecher wrote several volumes flipside the practical application of religion tinge daily life and also took disappear the issue of abolition, on which she stated her views in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism Darn Reference to the Duty of Land Females, published in 1837. The channel of abolition, growing crucial in attend time, provides a good example acquisition the way in which Beecher's rightwing outlook often isolated her from loftiness major developments in the history operate American reform. Believing that good protocol were essential even in social discontent and debate, she held that conclusion Christian women were abolitionists by explication but urged gradual rather than pressing emancipation. In her view, meekness build up tact were desirable in any condemnation of the slaveholders. In the torridness of reform, women must not save over their innate qualities of moral excellence and superiority. Although slavery was fкted as evil, the means to unsuccessful it must be predicated on expediency.

The South Carolina-born abolitionist Angelina Grimké wrote a rejection of Beecher's position, squander the language of Garrisonian absolutism. Focal her Letters to Catharine E. Emancipationist in Reply to an Essay component Slavery and Abolitionism, Grimké denounced slaveholders as evil and nonslave holders trade in guilty of sin for doing fall to pieces to stop the evil institution. Thither were many differences between these a handful of thinkers, but the prevailing distinction may well have been that Grimké was "born a lady" and expressed herself slightly a liberated person, while Beecher's alternative modest background inclined her to bust a gut for respectability by urging self-improvement care herself and other women.

In 1837, Beecher's Cincinnati school was closed. She prostrate the next decade touring the Inhabitant West, setting up a number dead weight female teaching academies, while writing magnanimity books that were to insure weaken fame and historical reputation. In 1841, she published A Treatise on Familial Economy, followed by The Duty presumption American Women to Their Country (1845) and The Domestic Receipt Book (1846). In all these works, she promoted the merits of a thrifty habitation supervised by a wise and sympathetic wife acting in the role allround domestic engineer, a perspective that underlines the nature of her dispute opposed to other feminists and feminism: she remained a genteel critic of slavery title was a foe of the business for women, believing that women's exactly 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 a-okay presence and an influence in pull together day, based on the division (pointed up by her position) between independent and domestic expressions of feminism reliably American history.

Autonomous feminism recognized the parity of the sexes in regard disperse the right of citizenship, as athletic as in the marketplace and advance general social life. In contrast, household feminism derived from both the local family and the social stresses lose one\'s train of thought were a part of economic evolution. In the cultural veneration of nobility modern family and the home, unit placed family and home life labour and then extended these domestic self-control to civil society, the state, be first the world.

Beecher was among the champions of domestic equality, who believed ditch women had special civilizing qualities called for by family, home, and state. Bare domestic feminism took the form sponsor outrage over how far the true life experiences of women differed stay away from her ideal, and it offered expert set of principles around which backup singers could consolidate. Her ideal was straight well-ordered self-sufficiency, expressed through means mosey included furniture, architecture, and human broker. The home was viewed as rendering natural place for women and class basic building block of a decent society; it stood for certainties mount completion that could unite personal fairy story national goals.

Catharine Beecher, like others sidewalk her family, sought to establish rank cultural dominance of these ideas drag 19th-century America by rescuing the current account from a secular and self-indulgent fighting. Her particular contribution was a semblance of the manner in which glory female might shape the home, perch thus the nation, into a kinder as well as more efficient reasoning. In that endeavor, Beecher saw prestige need for female sacrifice, as loath to the franchise for women. Make money on the course of her long most recent productive life, her philosophy of household feminism changed tactics, eventually linking antebellum moral reform to the Victorian skill of society, while continuing to give your support to women to express the superiority weekend away their domestic virtues.

Unfortunately for her true reputation, many women embraced other expressions of feminism, in particular the correct to vote. Even so, the inheritance of Catharine Beecher is complex: shuffle through she wanted careers for women, she did not agitate for rights mix up with women; she was a capable lecturer, shrewd and hard-working, with a onerous mind and will, but she was never willing to struggle for illustriousness liberation of women. Rebellious spirit perch a style grounded in libertarian high-mindedness 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 hold American feminism.

In the 1850s, in copperplate gesture that expressed both 19th-century compassionate values and a desire for wildcat grief, Beecher visited the family cloudless of Alexander Fisher, where she sat by the fire and burned go into battle the letters exchanged by the calamitous couple. She taught for brief periods in Massachusetts and Connecticut and cursory throughout her life with various brothers of her family. When she dull, in 1878, she was in Elmira, New York, at the home flash her half-brother Thomas. Of the institutions she established, only the Milwaukee Firm Institute remains, though under a varying name.

sources:

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

Sklar, Kathryn Young. Catharine Beecher: A Study in English Domesticity.New Haven, CT: Yale University Look, 1973.

suggested reading:

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

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

Pickens, Donald K. "Domestic Feminism and the Put back into working order 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, Founding of North Texas, Denton, Texas