Catharine E. Beecher: Treatise on Domestic Economy

Catharine E. Beecher (1800-1878) was the daughter of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and the elder sister of the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and is best known for her advocation of education for women. She received a formal education at a girls’ school in Connecticut but taught herself subjects that were not thought suitable for young ladies at the time. When she was twenty-one, she opened a school for girls in Hartford, Connecticut. She also organized a protest against the attempts by the administration of President Andrew Jackson to expel Native Americans from their lands in the Southeast—the Indian Removal Act (1830). When her father was called to a new post in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1832, Catharine (sometimes spelled “Catherine”) went with him and established a ladies’ seminary. Although she retired in 1837 because of poor health, she continued advocating for women’s education for forty years.

Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy was one of the first single-volume textbooks used in girls’ schools. The book is most remarkable, however, for the way it justifies female education. In Chapter 1, excerpted here, Beecher presents an argument for women’s position in contemporary society. Without directly challenging male power, she suggests that American women, through education and morality, can have an influence on American life and society that far outstrips their limited nineteenth-century roles.