Catharine Esther Beecher (1800–78) was an American educationalist and reformer. She promoted schools for women and advocated for their unique roles as instructors and moral guides of children.
Born in East Hampton, New York, Beecher was the eldest daughter of the Presbyterian minister and temperance movement leader Lyman Beecher. She was also the sister of the abolitionist and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the sister of clergyman and social reform advocate Henry Ward Beecher.
Catharine Beecher’s work as an educator and a reformer included the founding of schools for young women at Hartford and Cincinnati. She was also responsible for establishing women’s colleges in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin.
Beecher’s writings include An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism (1837,) The Evils Suffered by American Women and Children (1846,) and Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions (1874.)
Beecher emphasized that women could best influence society as mothers, teachers, and moral guides for the young. Her best-selling early work, Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841,) extolled the virtues of domestic life. An anti-Suffragist, she wrote Woman’s Profession as Mother and Educator, with Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage (1871) in opposition to the movement.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Catharine Beecher
The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.
—Catharine Beecher
Topics: Sympathy
How many young hearts have revealed the fact that what they had been trained to imagine the highest earthly felicity was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.
—Catharine Beecher
Topics: Marriage
As if reasoning were any kind of writing or talking which tends to convince people that some doctrine or measure is true and right.
—Catharine Beecher
Topics: Reason
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