Catharine Beecher

Catharine Beecher was born n East Hampton, New York on September 6, 1800. The daughter of outspoken religious leader Lyman Beecher and sister of Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and preacher Henry Ward Beecher, she was the eldest of eight surviving children.

When she was 10, Catherine's family moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, where she received her first formal education at Sarah Pierce’s Academy for Young Women. 

At Sarah Pierce’s Academy for Young Women, she was taught the limited curriculum available to young women. The experience left Catherine longing for additional opportunities for education.

In 1821 she began teaching at a school in New Haven, Connecticut and went through a religious crisis brought on by her father's attempt to force his Calvinist views on her.

Catharine was engaged to marry Professor Alexander M. Fisher of Yale University, but he died in the shipwreck of the Albion off the coast of Ireland in 1822 before the wedding took place. She remained single for the rest of her life.

Catharine Beecher

After her fiancée’s death, Catharine founded the Hartford Female Seminary, launching a life-long campaign as lecturer, writer, and advocate for women's education.

The Hartford Female Seminary began with one room and 7 students; within three years, it grew to almost 100 students with 10 rooms and 8 teachers.

Catharine was constantly making experiments, and practicing them upon the girls, weighing all their food before they ate it, holding that Graham flour and the Graham diet were better for them than richer food. Ten of her pupils invited her to dine with them at a restaurant. She accepted the invitation, and the excellent dinner changed her views. Thereafter they were served with more palatable food.

In 1832, Beecher moved with her father to Cincinnati to campaign for more schools and teachers in the frontier. She devoted herself there to the development of an extended plan for the physical, social, intellectual, and moral education of women. Beecher founded in the 1840s the Central Committee for Promoting National Education, which promoted teacher education and contributed to the establishment of education as a profession.

In 1852 she founded the American Women's Education Association. Beecher's goal was to rescue women who wasted their lives in frivolous "feminine" pursuits as well as those exploited as factory hands.

Catharine Beecher

Beecher strongly supported allowing children to simply be children and not prematurely forcing adulthood onto them. It was these beliefs that led her to speak on the value of kindergartens.

Among her many published works was Treatise of Domestic Economy (1841). In 1869, Beecher collaborated with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe on a new edition, retitled The American Woman's Home (1869) which became a hugely influential guide for generations of American housewives.

Beecher died in Elmira, New York from apoplexy on May 12, 1878. 

Sources Connecticut History, Wikipedia