359 - Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity

Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity
By Kathryn Kish Sklar
New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1973. 356 pp. $12.50

Only part of the fascination of this impressive biography lies in its portrait of an extremely able woman, although Catharine Beecher is well worth knowing for her own sake. Still more fascinating is the delineation of the cultural changes which resulted from her work-or in her biographer's phrase, of which Catharine Beecher was the "major theoretician"-because these we are living with now.

And who was Catharine Beecher? If that question had been asked of almost anyone in the mid-nineteenth century, the answer would have been immediate, and not as "one of the famous Beecher family," or "the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher," but as "the author of A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School." To suggest its importance by comparing it with the books by Dr. Benjamin Spock would be to underrate Catharine Beecher's achievement, because her treatise dealt not only with the raising of children, but also with the design and building of houses, home medical care, sanitation, nutrition and food preparation (including gardening, recipes, and the setting of tables), and diagrams for labor-saving devices like an apparatus for getting hot water to a bathtub. "Here for the first time," writes Kathryn Kish Sklar, "was a text that standardized American domestic practices prescribing one system that integrated psychological, physiological, economic, religious, social, and political factors, and in addition demonstrating how the specifics of the system should work."

Its impact, on its publication in 1841, was immediate, extensive, and profound, most notably in that herein, its author enunciated explicitly and persuasively a doctrine of the family which has had a tenacious influence on all American life since then. Herself unmarried, and without a home of her own during most of her life, Catharine Beecher saw the family as being the center for the promulgation of morality and virtue, with the wife and mother as the primary transmitter of social values and, ultimately, the creator of a national and even worldwide social cohesion. The training of women for domesticity and the teaching of values, therefore, was of major importance to society, and home-making was as dignified a profession as medicine or the ministry of a church.

If this sounds familiar, that is a measure of Catharine Beecher's success as an evangelist. If we suppose this pattern to be rooted deep

360 - Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity

in our culture, that is a measure of our historical blindness. It is not much more than a century old. The elements which went into the construction of that pattern were taken in part from New England Calvinism, in part from the nineteenth century social and cultural milieu, and in great part from Catharine Beecher's individual character and situation. To see how she brought them together into a comprehensive philosophy is to achieve a fresh perspective on the pattern itself. Whether one approves or disapproves of her vision of society is less important than to realize in what degree it was the creation of a single person responding to a singular predicament.

Even more significant for the future-that is, for us-was Catharine Beecher's system of morality, proclaimed in many of her other writings as well as in the Treatise. Its central virtue was self-sacrifice by the individual for the good of others-and seldom can the declaration, "Greater love hath no man than this . . . " have been carried to such lengths. In her view, although an action which did not entail self-sacrifice might be good, it could not be meritorious unless it were sacrificial. Women, especially, were called to the vocation of sacrifice. Their example in the home was to be the principal means by which that virtue would be communicated and so, ultimately, society would be redeemed. And such sacrifice was not merely a means to fulfilment for women; in itself it constituted fulfilment. That Catharine Beecher could not make it work in her own life is beside the point. Her handling of the ideal of sacrifice is bred into the bones even of present-day America: the movement which repudiates her notion that a woman's whole duty is sacrifice reflects her influence as conspicuously as that which affirms it as woman's whole fulfilment and source of power.

Catharine Beecher is fortunate in having a biographer who is at once as clear-eyed and as compassionate as Kathryn Kish Sklar. And we are fortunate in now having available this study which so ably fills a serious lacuna in our knowledge of our history, and hence of ourselves. Few political figures of the nineteenth century can have had so direct and pervasive an effect on American life today as Catharine Beecher. Why have we had to wait so long for this clarification?

Mary McDermott Shideler
Boulder, Colorado