Catharine Beecher and the Education of American Women

Abstract

CATHARINE BEECHER is only grudgingly accorded a place among the heroines of American history. The eldest child of Lyman Beecher, a renowned Congregationalist minister, Catharine Beecher is admired for her contributions to the education of women: the school she founded in 1823, Hartford Female Seminary, is acknowledged to have been one of the finest of its time; and her later work arranging for women from the East to teach in frontier communities, and founding the first normal schools in the West for women teachers is applauded. But the deeper significance of her work is ignored. She is known to have been a forthright, even a dogmatic woman, who cut a rather ridiculous figure in old age when, with corkscrew curls a-bobbing, she spoke out against women's suffrage, insisting that the development of woman's profession was more important than the vote. Beecher's aspirations for women meet with little sympathy today, for most people do not believe in the possibility of equal but separate spheres of influence for men and women, and this disbelief leads people to overlook the radical nature of many of Beecher's ideas. She argued that each woman, like each man, should be educated for a career, and she set out to define a professional structure for each type of work women should engage in. She was sensitive to the trend to professionalization, believing passionately that women would achieve equal status only when they had professionalized their work. Over the years her ideas on women's sphere became less conventional as her work led her into unforeseen paths. Thus, after she discovered that Governor William Slade was not