SOURCE: Sklar, Kathryn Kish. “The Building of a Glorious Temple, 1843.” In Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity, pp. 151-67. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973.

[In the following essay, Sklar examines Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy, a comprehensive handbook in which she discusses house-building, setting a table, cleaning, gardening, cooking, health and first aid, and childcare, and asserts that women are restricted to the domestic sphere because this promotes the stability of society.]

Insofar as Catharine Beecher's career can be said to have had a widespread and immediate impact on her society, that effect was achieved through the publication of her Treatise on Domestic Economy. Even before Catharine Beecher set out for Chillicothe in 1843, her Treatise had entered its fourth printing since its publication by a small Boston firm in 1841. After polishing the text to solidify its confident, authoritative tone, Catharine had in 1842 negotiated a new contract with Harper and Brothers. Its system of national distribution was well designed to exploit the demonstrated public enthusiasm for her text, and thus she had at last found an effective means to disseminate her ideas on American women. The Treatise was reprinted nearly every year from 1841 to 1856. Together with her supplementary receipt book, first published in 1846 and reprinted fourteen times before the publication of her enlarged compendium The American Woman's Home in 1869, Catharine Beecher's Treatise established her as a national authority on the psychological state and the physical well-being of the American home. This reputation was fortified by her Letters to Persons Who Are Engaged in Domestic Service (1842) and her Letters to the People on Health and Happiness (1855).¹

Catharine's Treatise explained every aspect of domestic life from the building of a house to the setting of a table. Students of technology have noted its crisp and effective designs, such as that for the plumbing system of a kitchen.² Describing the first servantless household, she supplied designs for the ingenious labor-saving devices she believed more pertinent to a democratic and “improving” age. In 1840, women who relied on written rather than oral instruction in domestic arts had to read separate books on health, child care, housebuilding, and cooking, or else rely on English compendiums that drew these topics together but were, in their extensive use of servants, inappropriate for American readers.³ Catharine's was the first American volume to pull all the disparate domestic employments together and to describe their functions in the American environment.

In addition to its functional utility, the book devoted careful attention to the psychology of domesticity. This duality of purpose made her book unique when it was published and renders it historically significant for the twentieth century. Here for the first time 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. In the next three decades Catharine Beecher could enter virtually any community in the United States and expect to be received as the heroine who had simplified and made understandable the mysterious arts of household maintenance, child rearing, gardening, cooking, cleaning, doctoring, and the dozen other responsibilities middle class women assumed to keep their children and husbands alive and well.⁴ Her Treatise, well worth its price of fifty cents, conveyed a sense of shared experience, but its purposeful tone prevented it from lapsing into sentimental intimacy. Catharine took her constituency seriously, and they rewarded her with their patronage.

A Treatise on Domestic Economy appeared at a time when there was a great need for such a standardized text. Many cultural indicators point to the heightened concern over the quality of domestic life in the 1840s—a concern that grew more emphatic when increasing geographic mobility removed many families from traditional sources of domestic knowledge.⁵ Just when Americans began to expect more from their domestic lives than ever before, the ability of the average American woman to meet this expectation diminished as she moved away from communal and familial ties that might have fortified her skills. Scholars of the history of technology have confirmed the technological rigor of Catharine Beecher's household designs, and have credited her with the beginning of household automation. Her innovations were meant to fill the gap she perceived between the society's expectations of women and the resources at their disposal for fulfilling those expectations. She more than anyone else may have made domesticity workable.⁶

Catharine was acutely conscious of the trials to which women were put by being unprepared to assume their domestic burdens. Conditions were so bad, Catharine said, that “it would seem as if the primeval curse, which has written the doom of pain and sorrow on one period of a young mother's life, in this country had been extended over all.” This was due to a lack of adequate information about how to fulfill domestic responsibilities. Tocqueville also noted the pioneer woman whose “delicate limbs appear shrunken; her features are drawn in; her eye is mild and melancholy; her whole physiognomy bears marks of a degree of religious resignation, a deep quiet of all passion,” Catharine quoted him. “To look at [her children's] strength, and her languor, one might imagine that the life she had given them had exhausted her own.”⁷

Even settled communities desired new definitions of and attributed greater importance to domestic duties. In Hartford a young preacher named Horace Bushnell agonized over his inability to arouse the interest of his congregation in the early 1840s, but in 1845 his career was rescued by a series of sermons declaring the careful nurture of children in the home as more important than conversion in shaping a Christian character. His parishioners eagerly adopted this doctrine, for it condoned the distinctive meanings they had already begun to attribute to the family group as an oasis of innocence amid the commercial acquisitiveness of American society.⁸ To this emerging ideology of domesticity, Catharine Beecher's Treatise contributed both practical details and some basic building blocks of social theory.

Its major contribution was to define a new role for women within the household. Of her four major predecessors, three were men, and all assumed male control of the domestic environment. In The Father's Book (1834), Theodore Dwight assumed male hegemony in the household, as did Amherst College's President, Herman Humphrey in his Domestic Education (1840). William Alcott advocated a more open and mutual relationship between men and women in his Young Housekeeper (1838), but he, like Lydia Maria Child in The American Frugal Housewife (1832), assumed the continuance of traditional gender roles inherited from the eighteenth century. While overtly acknowledging male dominance, Catharine Beecher's Treatise also exaggerated and heightened gender differences and thereby altered and romanticized the emphasis given to women's domestic role. Subsequent domestic manuals described a significantly different role for women from that anticipated by Dwight, Humphrey, Alcott, and Child.⁹ Horace Bushnell and Sarah Josepha Hale, the two chief representatives of this later style, diverged from Catharine Beecher on many points, as we shall see, but they shared essentially the same universe—one bifurcated into masculine and feminine dichotomies.

Quite apart from its ability to elucidate the new American ideology of the family, Catharine's book was, on a more utilitarian level, a badly needed modern compendium of the domestic arts relating to health, diet, hygiene, and general well-being. As a postrevolutionary generation bent on extracting practical benefits from their theoretical innovations, many Americans believed that elementary matters like diet and health should be as susceptible to improvement as anything else in the new age, and that wherever possible they should be made perfect. These expectations outreached the still rather crude abilities of professional medicine, however, and men and women turned to a variety of popular nostrums ranging from patent medicines to phrenology in their search for physiological betterment.¹⁰ In this context Catharine Beecher offered to new and settled communities alike a scientific but personal guide to improved health and well-being. The contrast between Catharine's Treatise and its best-selling predecessor, Lydia Maria Child's The American Frugal Housewife (1832), was as great as that between medieval and modern medicine. Child's volume passed on traditional home remedies for a wide variety of ailments and injuries, but gave no causal explanation for the link between illness and treatment. Catharine, however, explained such physiological differences as that between arteries and veins, and she described the fundamentals of modern first aid.

She provided a solid basis for understanding how the body functioned and how to keep it functioning well. Complete with illustrations describing the bone, muscle, nerve, circulation, digestive, and respiratory systems, her discussions of the bodily functions were straightforward and informative, presenting the topic in ways that engendered self-confidence and self-understanding. Catharine did not reserve the role of expert for herself but readily acknowledged the medical sources she had used and implied that anyone could easily learn as much as she by mastering these basic physiological facts.¹¹ Like Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care of a century later, Catharine's manual provided simple rules to enable the reader to judge for herself how best to deal with an inevitably more complicated reality. Thus in a typical discussion of a point of infant care she explained:

Take particular care of the food of an infant. If it is nourished by the mother, her own diet should be simple, nourishing, and temperate. If the child be brought up by hand, the milk of a new-milch cow, mixed with one third water, and sweetened a little with white sugar, should be the only food given, until the teeth come. … If the food appear to distress the child, after eating, first ascertain if the milk be really from a new-milch cow, as it may otherwise be too old. Learn also whether the cow lives on proper food.

Perhaps as important as the simple rules were the frequent exceptions her manual pointed out. After a discussion of “the management of young children,” in which she recommended government “by rewards more than penalties” and advised an intermediate path between too stern parental control and too weak, she concluded with a discussion of exceptions to that rule, the sensitivity of which was worthy of a twentieth-century child psychiatrist:

Children of active, heedless temperament, or those who are odd, awkward, or unsuitable, in their remarks and deportment, are often essentially injured by a want of patience and self-control in those who govern them. Such children often possess a morbid sensibility, which they strive to conceal, or a desire of love and approbation, which preys like a famine on the soul. And yet, they become objects of ridicule and rebuke, to almost every member of the family, until their sensibilities are tortured into obtuseness or misanthropy. Such children, above all others, need tenderness and sympathy. A thousand instances of mistake or forgetfulness should be passed over, in silence, while opportunities for commendation and encouragement should be diligently sought.¹²

The volume was like a good companion—knowledgeable but unpretentious, supportive without being intrusive, and above all, able to resolve self-doubts. Designed to reduce the anxiety of the reader, Catharine's discussions commiserated with her about the difficulties of her duties and supplied convincing resolutions of the ambiguities and contradictions involved in her everyday tasks.

The major ambiguity faced by American women in the 1830s and 1840s was not, however, whether they should govern their children with a light or heavy hand, but how, in an egalitarian society, the submission of one sex to the other could be justified. Women in America had always experienced such inequity, but they had never before needed to reconcile it with a growing ideology of popular democracy and equal rights.¹³ Furthermore, this contradiction was heightened as the increased options available to white males in the first decades of the nineteenth century seemed to accompany a more sharply limited sphere designated for white women during the same period.¹⁴ Catharine Beecher did not believe that the connection between these two phenomena was accidental. Like other writers of the period, most notably Sarah Josepha Hale and Horace Bushnell, Catharine Beecher tried to reconcile the inequality of women with an egalitarian democracy by emphasizing the importance of woman's sphere of domesticity.¹⁵ But unlike Bushnell and Hale, Catharine Beecher did not try to obscure the fundamental assumption of inequality upon which this separation of spheres rested. Bushnell and Hale believed that women were “naturally” suited to domesticity, but Catharine Beecher explained to her readers that women were restricted to the domestic sphere as a political expedient necessary to the maintenance of democracy in America.

The greater the social, political, and economic expansiveness in the country at large, the greater the tensions, and the keener the need to discover ways to reduce conflict, Catharine believed. Otherwise the system might generate more self-destruction than coherence. In a democracy as agitated and tension-filled as the United States in the 1840s, some form of hierarchy was needed to avoid a war of all against all, she said. She led her readers to conclude that by removing half the population from the arena of competition and making it subservient to the other half, the amount of antagonism the society had to bear would be reduced to a tolerable limit. Moreover, by defining gender identity as more important than class, regional, or religious identity, and by ignoring altogether the imponderables of American racial divisions, she promoted the belief that the society's only basic division was that between men and women.

Catharine Beecher drew most of these ideas from her reading of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and she frequently quoted at length from his study. “The Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy which governs the manufactories of our age,” Catharine explained, “by carefully dividing the duties of man from those of woman, in order that the great work of society may be the better carried on.” To support her remarks she cited Tocqueville's belief that “in no country has such constant care been taken, as in America, to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes.” Tocqueville noted, Catharine continued, that the American woman's centrality in the home did not subvert the power of the man in the family. Americans believe, Tocqueville concluded,

that the natural head of the conjugal association is man. [Americans] do not, therefore, deny him the right of directing his partner; and they maintain, that, in the smaller association of husband and wife, as well as in the great social community, the object of democracy is, to regulate and legalize the powers which are necessary, not to subvert all power.¹⁶

Elaborating on Tocqueville's analysis, Catharine explained that this sharp division of sex roles arose from the tensions generated by democratic conditions. Unlike the females of “monarchical and aristocratic lands,” where “all ranks and classes are fixed in a given position, and each person is educated for a particular sphere and style of living,” Catharine wrote, American women live in a society where “every thing is moving and changing.” The flow of wealth is constantly shifting, she added, and since the society lacks permanent definitions of status, it is in a constant state of agitation.

Persons in poverty, are rising to opulence, and persons of wealth, are sinking to poverty. The children of common laborers, by their talents and enterprise, are becoming nobles in intellect, or wealth, or office; while the children of the wealthy, enervated by indulgence, are sinking to humbler stations. The sons of the wealthy are leaving the rich mansions of their fathers, to dwell in the log cabins of the forest, where very soon they shall bear away the daughters of ease and refinement, to share the privations of a new settlement. Meantime, even in the more stationary portions of the community, there is a mingling of all grades of wealth, intellect, and education. … Thus, persons of humble means are brought into contact with those of vast wealth, while all intervening grades are placed side by side. Thus too, there is a constant comparison of conditions, among equals, and a constant temptation presented to imitate the customs, and to strive for the enjoyments, of those who possess larger means.

In this democratic turmoil, Catharine said, in order to decrease hostilities and tensions, “a system of laws must be established, which sustain certain relations and dependencies in social and civil life.” Chief among these was the subordination of the wife to the husband. Like the subordination of children to parents, employees to employers, and citizens to magistrates, the subordination of women to men was necessary if society was to “go forward harmoniously.”¹⁷

The position of women in American culture was therefore an example of how “superior and subordinate relations” contribute to “the general good of all.” Women “take a subordinate station” not because they are naturally subordinate, or even because subordination suits them, but because it promotes the general good of the society.¹⁸ Catharine believed it was essential to tell women that their submissive role had a social importance transcending their own personal interests, for she thought that they would thereby be better reconciled to it and more effective in implementing the grander purposes of their role.

This was only one example, however, of the ways in which the American domestic experience could promote the national good, but it and other potential contributions to the general weal could not be fully utilized as long as Americans remained confused about the link between domesticity and nationality. In her Treatise Catharine Beecher proceeded, often by indirection and implication, to shape a coherent ideology of domesticity that would answer the needs of American democracy.

Catharine began with the premise that the home was a perfect vehicle for national unity because it was a universally experienced institution recognizing no economic, political, or regional boundaries. Even girls who worked in the mills made a small home for themselves, Catharine said, and adopting Tocqueville's thesis that the conditions of mobility and equality in America engendered a loss of traditional social identities, she pointed to the domestic experience as a focus around which a new and unified national identity could be built. For the language of domesticity could more easily be universalized than any single dialect of class or region or age. At the beginning of the 1850s Harriet Beecher Stowe did much to persuade Americans that white and black Americans obeyed the same domestic impulses, and through Uncle Tom's Cabin she helped unify a theretofore divided northern opinion. At the beginning of the decade Catharine Beecher set out to transcend social divisions by emphasizing the universality and standardizing the contours of domestic values. Her task was lightened by the fact that she could build on the traditional American distinction between sex roles and the contemporary eagerness to reinforce them.¹⁹

To this principle of universality, Catharine added four corollary concepts to round out her domestic ideology. By the end of her Treatise the domestic sphere seemed not so much removed from as central to the national life.

Catharine first paid ample homage to the role of women in shaping the future of the American experiment. After a long quotation from Tocqueville testifying to the significance of the “social revolution” in America, Catharine agreed that the millennium seemed to be coming in a social rather than a strictly religious form. “Startled kings and sages, philosophers and statesmen, are watching us with that interest which a career so illustrious, and so involving their own destiny, is calculated to excite,” Catharine wrote. “They are studying our institutions, scrutinizing our experience, and watching for our mistakes,” she said, “that they may learn whether ‘a social revolution, so irresistible, be advantageous or prejudicial to mankind.’” The future of the United States was a global, not just a national concern. “This is the Country,” Catharine continued,

which the Disposer of events designs shall go forth as the cynosure of nations, to guide them to the light and blessedness of that [millennial] day. To us is committed the grand, the responsible privilege, of exhibiting to the world, the beneficent influences of Christianity, when carried into every social, civil, and political institution. …

Since the future of the world depended on the United States, and the future of the United States depended on “the intellectual and moral character of the mass of the people,” and the shaping of that character was in turn “committed mainly to the female hand,” Catharine concluded that “to American women, more than to any others on earth, is committed the exalted privilege of extending over the world those blessed influences, which are to renovate degraded man.”²⁰

Catharine insisted all American women were equally important to the achievement of this task. Their class or regional differences did not matter since they all worked within a shared system of values and toward the same goal. “No American woman then has any occasion for feeling that hers is an humble or insignificant lot,” Catharine continued, for “the value of what an individual accomplishes, is to be estimated by the importance of the enterprise achieved, and not by the particular position of the laborer.” Women should not see themselves as “isolated” laborers, Catharine said, but should be “invigorated and cheered” by the fact that they are “indispensable portions of a grand result.” The end of the first section of her Treatise rose to the pinnacle of rhetorical heights to extol the unified purposes of American womanhood:

The woman who is rearing a family of children; the woman, who labors in the schoolroom; the woman who, in her retired chamber, earns, with her needle, the mite, which contributes to the intellectual and moral elevation of her Country; even the humble domestic, whose example and influence may be moulding and forming young minds, while her faithful services sustain a prosperous domestic state;—each and all may be animated by the consciousness, that they are agents in accomplishing the greatest work that ever was committed to human responsibility. It is the building of a glorious temple, whose base shall be coextensive with the bounds of the earth, whose summit shall pierce the skies, whose splendor shall beam on all lands; and those who hew the lowliest stone, as much as those who carve the highest capital, will be equally honored, when its top-stone shall be laid, with new rejoicings of the morning stars, and shoutings of the sons of God.²¹

This apotheosis of American national development was to be achieved by the united efforts of American women—exemplary in their ability to conform to the needs of their nation on the basis of their gender alone and to disregard their secondary identities of class and locale. Thus through their nurturing role women were bound to a common purpose and form. In contrast to most of American society, they formed a homogeneous group.

Employing Tocqueville again, Catharine noted further that most of American society acknowledged the homogeneous identity of women by generalizing the domestic relationship between men and women throughout the culture. Thus the whole culture was in a sense made “safe” for women, so that wherever they moved in it, the ideology of male protection and female dependence would be maintained. Thus, Tocqueville saw that “in America, a young unmarried woman may, alone, and without fear, undertake a long journey.” For whatever her status all women are assumed by American men “to be virtuous and refined.” “As if in compensation for [their subordination],” Catharine said, women “universally in this country, through every class of society [are given] precedence … in all the comforts, conveniences and courtesies, of life.”²² Catharine did not articulate this argument fully, but she implied that since a woman's gender defined her completely, the culture could, be adding a middle-class bias to female identity, significantly enlarge the scope of middle-class values and behavior. For every woman then became a purveyor of middle-class culture. Thus what some historians have called the feminization of American culture can be seen as a means of promoting nationally homogeneous cultural forms, and the emphasis given to gender identity can be viewed as an attempt by a society laden with class and regional anxieties to compensate for these divisive factors.²³

Besides the creation and extension of a homogeneous ethic, domesticity contributed two other stabilizing pillars to American democracy. These were, according to Catharine Beecher, the example women provided of voluntary and self-initiated submission to authority, and the compensatory role women played in counteracting commercial and acquisitive values. In their submission to men American women acted as an archetypal example of how to achieve social order in a democracy, Catharine said, for their marriage partner, being of their own choosing, is legitimized in his authority over her, just as the American government, being of the people's choosing, is justified in the assertion of its authority.²⁴ Again quoting Tocqueville, Catharine's Treatise concluded that women deem it an honor to act in this exemplary manner: “They attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will, and make it their boast to bend themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off.”²⁵ A more far-reaching and immediately effective consequence of American domesticity, however, was to define an oasis of noncommercial values in an otherwise acquisitive society.

Like other writers of the period, including Sarah Josepha Hale and Horace Bushnell, Catharine Beecher believed that the values of the home stood in opposition to some other American values, but unlike Bushnell and Hale, she wanted the same set of values to apply to both spheres, and she was far more aggressive in applying domestic values to the rest of society. The success of Catharine Beecher's Treatise may have been due to its ability to combine a convincing domestic ideology with practical advice demonstrating how these ideals could be realized. Recognizing the practical fact that American women lived in a society as well as a home, she frequently noted the ways in which the values of the society necessarily impinged on the home. “The practice of early rising has a relation to the general interests of the social community, as well as to that of each distinct family,” Catharine wrote in a typical passage. “Now if a small portion of the community establish very different hours,” she continued, decrying the practices of some families, “it makes a kind of jostling, in all the concerns and interests of society.”²⁶ In both theory and practice, Catharine's Treatise promoted congruence between domestic and social values. That goal remained unchanged by the fact that the spheres were not yet completely in harmony.

Horace Bushnell and Sarah Hale, however, described a basic and enduring opposition between the values of domesticity and much of American society. In Christian Nurture Bushnell described the home as a source of “permanent, consistent, singleness of aim,” set apart from a too mobile and confusing outside world. In contrast to “the extreme individualism of our modern philosophy,” Bushnell said, the family operated by an “organic law” by “associating children with the character and destiny of their parents.” In what was perhaps the beginnings of the feminine mystique, Bushnell attributed to the mother powers of intuition and sentiment that play on the child's “emotions and sentiments, and work a character in him by virtue of an organic power.” Nevertheless, Bushnell admonished the women who acted by this mystical romantic formula to recognize the occasions when “common sense and solid reality” are needed, when “no rhapsodies are wanted, or flights of feeling.”²⁷

While the mother was thus encouraged to use her powers of intuition, she was denied their full employment, and required to recognize the greater authority of the common sense world her sons were destined to enter after their character had been properly molded. Bushnell could more easily ignore the contradictions of this policy than could the women who tried to implement it. They were left to discover for themselves when to employ their “organic” powers and when to use their common sense. Christian Nurture may have closed the gap between parent and child, but it enlarged the gulf between the home and the outside world, and placing women firmly inside the walls of domesticity, it asked them to perform a kind of penance for the sins of a society they were not fully allowed to enter. Catharine Beecher's readers labored under no such handicap, for they were asked to eliminate rather than to endure the contradictions between general and domestic values.

Sarah Hale, editor for half a century of the influential magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, also adopted and promoted the ideology of domesticity as a compensating set of values in “a society given over without reservation to the pursuit of wealth.”²⁸ The male and female spheres were separated to allow men to continue their acquisitive pursuits and to enable women to concentrate on their moral role. Without one the growth of the society would stop, and without the other the course of that growth might be morally objectionable. Together they gave the society an energized labor force and a free conscience. So long as women's labor was unsullied by the business mentality, so long as it was a labor of love and not for gain, the culture might retain its contact with primitive virtue and goodness.²⁹

Catharine's analysis of domesticity does not differ in purpose from that of Bushnell or Hale. All agreed that the isolation of women in the home and away from full participation in the society decreased the tensions and anxieties that characterized American life. They agreed, moreover, that this was done “in order that the great work of society may be the better carried on.”³⁰ But rather than seeing the home as a haven set apart from society to compensate for or counteract certain characteristics of American life, Catharine saw the home as an integral part of a national system, reflecting and promoting mainstream American values. The only requirement for a place on this cultural dais was that women reject aggression and embrace deference as a style of social interaction.

Three lifelong concerns of Catharine Beecher's were resolved in her ideology of domesticity. First, domesticity revived the Puritan notion of the subjection of the individual to the larger social welfare, yet it presented this notion in a form acceptable to the nineteenth century. In this democratic context the home was a much more effective agency of social authority than the clergy or aristocracy. For in the delineation of its own lines of authority the family relied on “natural” relationships of superiority and subordination. As a society in miniature, the family could therefore be used as a model for the extension of such relationships elsewhere in the society. Although the family located authority at a personal level, domesticity, as Catharine Beecher described it, confirmed the individual's obligation to recognize and conform to “a system of laws” that sustained “superior and subordinate relations” in the society as a whole.

Second, domesticity answered the dilemma over piety and morality that Catharine inherited from her father. Bushnell, a clergyman like Lyman Beecher, superimposed a romantic epistemology on a common-sense culture in order to maintain the importance of piety over morality. Catharine overcame this dichotomy by using the concept of self-denial to show how the impulses of the heart were related to external behavior. Self-denial was built into the very identity Catharine Beecher defined for women in the United States. Submission to the will and needs of others was, Catharine believed, automatically required of American women. Therefore their own personal promptings of the heart were necessarily related to their behavior since sacrifice was by definition an act that linked selflessness of heart with an external deed.

In her Treatise Catharine called on businessmen to imitate the self-denying ethic of the home and use their wealth “for the greatest good of those around them,” rather than for “mere selfish indulgences.” Fighting the spread of undomestic and “aristocratic” habits in the wealthy, Catharine decried the “great portion of the rich [who] seem to be acting on the principle, that the more God bestows on them, the less are they under obligation to practice any self-denial, in fulfilling his benevolent plan of raising our race to intelligence and holiness.”³¹

In addition to treating the two important problems of leadership and morality, Catharine's brand of domesticity also addressed the problem of national unity—a concern Catharine inherited from her father but recast in a mold that gave centrality to women. Her Treatise promoted a practical as well as theoretical base for national unity, however, for throughout her rules for health care, her receipts, her formulas for household management, her description of proper manners, her prescriptions for infant care, Catharine sought above all to standardize and systematize American domestic practices.

This urge for regularity that marked nearly every page of Catharine's Treatise had both a personal and a social dimension. On a private level it tried to lift women out of the confusing morass of contradictory demands on their time and energies by establishing priorities or precise timetables and by adopting efficient work methods. “Without attempting any such systematic employment of time, and carrying it out, so far as they can control circumstances, most women are rather driven along, by the daily occurrences of life,” Catharine wrote, “so that, instead of being the intelligent regulators of their own time, they are the mere sport of circumstances.” There was nothing, she said, “which so distinctly marks the difference between weak and strong minds, as the fact, whether they control circumstances, or circumstances control them.”³² This private psychological regimen was further enhanced by the belief that these same priorities and practices were adopted by families throughout the country.

Deeming the standardization of public manners and attitudes as important as standardization of household routine, Catharine Beecher said that just as one set of management rules could apply to all households, so one code of manners applied to all Americans. “Now the principles of democracy require, that the same courtesy, which we accord to our own circle, shall be extended to every class and condition; and that distinction, of superiority and subordination, shall depend, not on accidents of birth, fortune, or occupation, but solely on those relations, which the good of all classes equally require,” Catharine wrote. “The distinctions demanded, in a democratic state, are simply those, which result from relations, that are common to every class, and are for the benefit of all.” Thus although class differences do admittedly exist, Catharine said that American manners should not reflect these differences, but rather acknowledge differences of status only where these are “common to every class.” Manners may therefore recognize only differences such as those between men and women, children and elders, feeble and healthy. “The rules of good breeding, in a democratic state must be founded on these principles,” Catharine concluded. “Otherwise there would be constant scrambling, among those of equal claims, and brute force must be the final resort.”³³

In a similar way she provided rules standardizing diet, food preparation, meal hours, health care, house and kitchen furnishings, size and number of rooms, charitable responsibilities, and recreation—here even suggesting that “serious and intelligent persons” patronize horseraces “in order to regulate them.”³⁴

In the history of writings on domestic management, A Treatise on Domestic Economy stood between traditional guides like Lydia Maria Child's The American Frugal Housewife of 1832 (for many years its chief competitor) and professional writings like Helen Campbell's Household Economics of 1898. Catharine Beecher marked the midpoint between Child's “general maxims” and Campbell's highly specialized lectures. This progression is perhaps best described by their respective attitudes toward the rooms of a house. Child nowhere mentioned differentiated rooms within the home; Catharine Beecher provided detailed drawings and instructions for the construction of an eight-room house, each room designed for an explicit use as a parlor, kitchen, bedroom, or nursery; and Helen Campbell further elaborated on these distinctions to claim that “a separate room is the right of every human being; a place where one can lock the door, be safe from intrusion, and in silence and freedom gather strength for the next thing to be done.”³⁵ Catharine Beecher's concern was to subsume individual diversity in order to build a commonality of culture. By the end of the century this culture had passed through the crucible in which its identity was forged and had elaborated so ubiquitous a structure that isolation was more to be desired than heightened participation.

Catharine's several writings on domestic economy in the 1870s and her enlarged and partially revised The American Woman's Home, co-authored with Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1869, presented essentially the same ideology linking domestic life with the life of the nation, but two pairs of tensions that Catharine had tried to resolve in the 1840s appear by the 1870s to have stretched beyond the possibility of mutual accommodation. Neither the relationship between men and women nor that between upper and lower classes were by 1869 so easily resolved for Catharine. For each of these new problems Catharine devised new domestic forms.

Articulating a more complex argument in defense of “the unequal distribution of property,” generally more conscious of the gulf between rich and poor, and citing Herbert Spencer rather than Tocqueville to justify the importance of the domestic sphere, Catharine advocated in 1869 the creation of settlement houses wherein “several ladies” should take up residence in areas of urban poverty and “from the vast accumulation of misery and sin at hand on every side, should select the orphans, the aged, the sick, and the sinful, and spend time and money for their temporal and spiritual elevation.”³⁶ The last paragraph of Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper of 1873 rejoiced “in the increasingly open avenues to useful and remunerating occupations for women, enabling them to establish homes of their own, where, if not as the natural mother, yet as a Christ-mother, they may take in neglected ones, and train future mothers, teachers, and missionaries for the world.”³⁷ The family, although still a source of morality and virtue, seemed no longer a society in miniature to Catharine. It seemed to embody rather than to meliorate the tensions between social classes and between men and women. In her later works Catharine appended to the usual domestic forms an entirely female domesticity, in which a woman “who earns her own livelihood can institute the family state” by adopting children. “Then to her will appertain the authority and rights that belong to man as the head of a family,” Catharine pointed out. She also reminded her readers “that the distinctive duty of obedience to man does not rest on women who do not enter the relations of married life.”³⁸ Between 1841 and 1869 Catharine Beecher not only witnessed the development of an urban industrial society, but she also committed herself to the creation of a more autonomous female culture.

Thus her Treatise paradoxically provided Catharine with the framework whereby she could begin to explore alternatives to the American ethic of domesticity. Nevertheless she was too deeply immersed in its rituals to break away completely from domestic forms. In her Treatise she had articulated concepts central to her own life as well as to the life of her nation. For her the Treatise was both a summary and an exorcising of the domestic impulses she had known since childhood. It cleared the way for new personal and professional concerns. For the nation, domesticity may have been equally effective in easing the passage from turbulent youth to regulated maturity.

Notes

1. Eugene Exman, The Brothers Harper, pp. 323-26, describes Harpers' distribution network during this period. CB's [Catharine Beecher's] Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School was also adopted by Massachusetts for use in the public schools (Introduction to 1843 ed. of Treatise). It was reprinted in 1841 (Marsh, Capen, Lyon & Webb, Boston), 1842 (rev. ed., T. H. Webb, Boston), and in 1842, 1843 (new rev. ed.), 1845, 1846 (3rd rev. ed.), 1847, 1848, 1849, 1850, 1851, 1852, 1854, 1855, and 1856 by Harper & Bros., New York.

   The 1869 work, The American Woman's Home, or Principles of Domestic Science, was done jointly with HBS [Harriet Beecher Stowe], presumably to capitalize on her national fame after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. This was reprinted in 1873 as The New Housekeeper's Manual: Embracing a New Revised Edition of the American Woman's Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science. Being a Guide to Economical, Healthful, Beautiful and Christian Homes. Other domestic economy publications by CB and HBS include: CB, Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper (1873), reprinted in 1874 and 1876; CB, Physiology and Calisthenics for Schools and Families (1856), reprinted in 1860, 1862, and 1867; CB and HBS, Principles of Domestic Science; As Applied to the Duties and Pleasures of the Home. A Text Book for the Use of Young Ladies in Schools, Seminaries, and Colleges (1870), reprinted in 1871 and 1873. HBS also published separately House and Home Papers (Boston, 1869) under the pseudonym Christopher Crowfield.

2. CB's architectural designs were executed by Daniel Wadsworth. She apparently did the other household designs herself. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p. 326.

3. The most popular English work in America was Thomas Webster and Mrs. Parkes, An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy. The American edition was published by Harper. CB's Treatise (pp. 44-52) warned upper class American women against imitating English aristocratic languor and urged them to adopt a new model of American self-denying benevolent activity. The liability of American women to “melancholy, hysteria, hypochondriasis and other varieties of mental distress” was due to their inability to find activities commensurate with their aspirations, she said. If they could feel they were acting “for the good of society,” their mental distress would cease. Lacking a social norm that was appropriate for American circumstances, and imitating the English example was disasterous for both middle and upper class American women, CB said. The “middle rank” of women suffered nervous exhaustion in trying to imitate a model that was economically beyond them, and upper class American women needed more moral nourishment than the English model provided.

4. When she entered Burlington, Iowa, in 1848, e.g., The Iowa State Gazette hailed CB's arrival: “Miss Beecher whose name has long since become a household divinity is now in Burlington” (29 March 1848). This widespread need is typically expressed in Godey's Lady's Book 23 (July 1841): 41, by a letter from a mother: “I want more particular directions. I want a daily course of conduct pointed out, by which I can make my daughters healthy as well as intelligent, and happy as well as good.”

5. These themes are explored further in William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, esp. chap. 3; Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic; Barbara Cross, Horace Bushnell, Minister to a Changing America, esp. chap. 5; Helen Papashvily, All the Happy Endings; Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family, vol. 2, From Independence through the Civil War, esp. chaps. 5 and 6; and Glenda Gates Riley, “The Subtle Subversion: Changes in the Traditionalist Image of the American Woman,” Historian 32 no. 2, (February 1970).

   One contributing cause to the disorientation of domestic life during these years might have been the beginnings of the shift to a consumer society. Not fully complete, this shift might have been far enough along to compel people to be conscious of keeping up appearances, but not sure enough of the mechanisms for doing it. CB at least presages this shift in her Treatise (p. 172) encouraging the consumption of goods as a means of promoting the national economy:

   Suppose that two millions of the people in the United States were conscientious persons, and relinquished the use of every thing not absolutely necessary to life and health. It would instantly throw out of employment one half of the whole community. The manufacturers, mechanics, merchants, agriculturists, and all the agencies they employ, would be beggared, and one half of those not reduced to poverty, would be obliged to spend all their extra means, in simply supplying necessaries to the other half. The use of superfluities, therefore. to a certain extent, is as indispensable to promote industry, virtue, and religion, as any direct giving of money or time.

6. Ellul, The Technological Society, p. 326. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, p. 614, pays tribute to CB's “classic proposals” for domestic efficiency.

7. CB, Treatise, p. 47.

8. Cross, Horace Bushnell, pp. 58-63.

9. Theodore Dwight, The Father's Book, pp. 187-99; Herman Humphrey, Domestic Education; William Alcott, The Young Housekeeper; Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife. Although the first of this new literature of the 1840s, CB's Treatise generally embodied attitudes toward women found in such later works as: Margaret Coxe, Claims of the Country on American Females; Margaret Graves, Women in America; and Sarah Josepha Hale, Housekeeping and Keeping House. Harriet Martineau's Household Education is the only work of the 1840s that employs the less exaggerated gender roles of the eighteenth century. For more complete bibliographies of domestic manuals see Wishy, The Child and the Republic and Ryan, “American Society and the Cult of Domesticity, 1830-1860,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California of Santa Barbara, 1971).

10. See Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom's Ferment, esp. chap. 16; and Joseph F. Kett, The Formation of the American Medical Profession, esp. chap. 5.

11. CB, Treatise, chap. 5.

12. Ibid., pp. 216-17, 231.

13. For an adequate summary of the position of women in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America and the contrasts wrought by Jacksonian Democracy, see Calhoun, Social History of the American Family, 2:79-131.

14. William Taylor touches on this dynamic in Cavalier and Yankee, pp. 166-76. Oscar Handlin has pointed out the same dynamic between white men and black men in seventeenth-century Virginia in Race and Nationality in American Life, chap. 1. The Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848 pointed to the manifest contradiction between democratic theory and democratic practices with reference to women. See Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More, pp. 143-54.

15. For further discussion of Bushnell and Hale, see pp. 161-63. See also Riley, “Subtle Subversion,” and Welter, “True Womanhood.”

16. CB, Treatise, pp. 28-29, 40.

17. Ibid., pp. 25-26. Marriage across class lines was taken as proof that democracy was working and was a favorite theme of other domestic economy books besides CB's. See, e.g., Solon Robinson, How to Live, pp. 34-68. Intermarriage in this fashion could be seen in anthropological terms as similar to the exchange of women described by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Elementary Structure of Kinship: “The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage,” Levi-Strauss suggests, “is not established between a man and a woman, where each owes and receives something, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners between whom the exchange takes place” (p. 115). Thus in the United States as well as in “primitive” tribes women may have been exchanged between otherwise hostile groups to promote amity between them. The general submission of women to men is a necessary precondition to such an exchange.

18. CB, Treatise, p. 26.

19. Ibid., pp. 25-38. For the domestic influence on Uncle Tom's Cabin, see Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore, pp. 11-35. Recent quantitative research by Kenneth Lockridge, “Literacy in Colonial New England: A Summary of Preliminary Researches,” (paper written at the University of Michigan, 1973), indicates that gender identity became increasingly functional in New England society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while class identity grew less functional. Literacy, Lockridge found, was related to class in the seventeenth century. Both men and women of upper income levels were literate, while both genders of lower income groups were generally not literate. This class-based distribution of seventeenth-century literacy gave way by the end of the eighteenth century to a gender-based distribution. Thus literacy became virtually universal among males of all classes, while fewer than 50 percent of women—regardless of class—were literate. “The imperviousness of women's illiteracy was the result of deliberate intention on the part of this culture,” Lockridge concluded. “Women were discriminated against because they were women, not because they were poor” (pp. 25-26). Nineteenth-century gender distinctions therefore began on a cultural foundation well established in the previous century. Similarly, the inverse relationship between class and gender identity and the tendency of the latter to replace the former as a basic building block of social structure was not an invention of the nineteenth century, but it was first given ideological articulation during that period.

20. CB, Treatise, pp. 35-37.

21. Ibid., pp. 37-38.

22. Ibid., pp. 32-33.

23. Fred Lewis Pattee, The Feminine Fifties (New York, 1940). Peter Stearns has pointed to the relationship between the accentuated gender identity of nineteenth-century English working class culture and the way that tended to obscure strong class identity in the same group. See his “Working Class Women in Britain, 1890-1914,” in Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still, pp. 100-20.

24. CB, Treatise, p. 25.

25. Ibid., p. 29. Women who did not behave in this way, Tocqueville continued, foolishly exempt themselves from the only role the society defines as honorable, and praiseworthy for them.

26. Ibid., p. 127.

27. Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture, pp. 36, 402, 30, and 388. Although Bushnell did not exclude fathers from nurturing responsibilities, he obviously expected them to bridge both the domestic and outside worlds, while mothers were to dwell only in “a place of quiet” and have “quiet minds which the din of our public war never embroils” (Bushnell, “American Politics,” The American National Preacher 14 [New York, 1840]:199).

28. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, p. 115.

29. Two typical passages from the “Editor's Table” of Godey's Lady's Book illustrate this ideology: “The destiny of the human race is thus dependent on the condition and conduct of woman. And now, when her condition is so greatly improved, her standard of conduct must be proportionately elevated. We do not mean by this, that she is to emulate man, or strive to do his work. She has a wide, a noble sphere of her own” (vol. 23 [August 1841], pp. 93-94). “And all in-door pursuits she should be encouraged to learn and undertake, because these harmonize with her natural love of home and its duties, from which she should never, in idea, be divorced” (vol. 47 [July 1853], pp. 84-85).

    One of the best examples of Sarah Josepha Hale's way of thinking was manifested by Professor J. H. Agnew of the University of Michigan, writing in Harper's New Monthly Magazine 3, (October 1851): “Another office of woman is, to check the utilitarianism, the money-loving spirit of the day,” he said in a typical passage. [Agnew's emphasis.] “Women's office is also to soften political asperities in the other sex, and themselves to shun political publicity.” Agnew concluded: “Another evident office of women is, to regulate the forms, and control the habits of social life. … Let man, then, exercise power; woman exert influence.”

30. CB, Treatise, p. 28, quote from Tocqueville.

31. Ibid., p. 193.

32. Ibid., p. 160.

33. Ibid., p. 140.

34. Ibid., p. 246.

35. Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife, went through thirty-three editions until it was last reprinted in 1870. A much smaller and somewhat cheaper volume than CB's Treatise, Child's Housewife was a compendium of general hints for economical housekeeping and cooking. Three-fourths of it were receipts. For the economic success of Child's volume (a fact which CB must have known about and which possibly inspired her to write her own domestic work) see Milton Meltzer, Tongue of Flame, p. 27. CB, Treatise, pp. 262-72 for drawings on house construction. Helen Campbell, Household Economics, p. 28.

36. CB and HBS, American Woman's Home, p. 447. The chapters written by HBS are clearly distinguishable from those written by CB. HBS's portions are not long and, unlike most of the rest of the book, deviate from the original topical scheme of the 1841 Treatise.

37. CB, Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper, p. 465.

38. CB and HBS, The American Woman's Home, p. 204.

Bibliography

Unpublished Works

Lockridge, Kenneth. “Literacy in Colonial New England: A Summary of Preliminary Researches.” Paper written at the University of Michigan, 1973.

Ryan, Mary Patricia. “American Society and the Cult of Domesticity, 1830-1860.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1971.

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Agnew, J. H. “Woman's Offices and Influence,” Harpers New Monthly Magazine 3, October, 1851.

Beecher, Catharine. Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper. New York: Harper & Bros., 1873.

———. Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School. Boston: T. H. Webb & Co., 1843.

Beecher, Catharine, and Stowe, Harriet B. The American Woman's Home, or Principles of Domestic Science. New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1869.

———. The New Housekeeper's Manual: Embracing a New Revised Edition of the American Woman's Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science. Being a Guide to Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes. New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1873.

———. Principles of Domestic Science; As Applied to the Duties and Pleasures of the Home. A Text Book for the Use of Young Ladies in Schools, Seminaries, and Colleges. New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1870.

Bushnell, Horace. “American Politics.” The American National Preacher 14 (1840).

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