SOURCE: Martin, Jane Roland. “Beecher's Homemakers.” In Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman, pp. 103-38. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

[In the following excerpt, Martin maintains that Catharine Beecher's theories of women's education and domestic management in Treatise on Domestic Economy strongly emphasize the importance and challenges of nineteenth-century women's domestic role, progressively placing it on the same level as men's public role.]

In A Treatise on Domestic Economy, published in the United States just fifty years after A Vindication was published in England, Catharine Beecher extols the wife-mother role for which her daughters, like Wollstonecraft's, are destined.¹ The first text to systematize American domestic practice, this work sets forth the details of household maintenance, gardening, cooking, sewing, child rearing, caring for the sick, and other tasks carried out in the home. According to Kathryn Kish Sklar, Beecher's biographer, A Treatise established Beecher as a national authority on the American home, and its rigorous descriptions of household functions set the stage for the household automation movement that was to come later. But it is a mistake to regard A Treatise simply as a description of domestic work. Sklar says that it “defines a new role for women within the household,”² that although Beecher was by no means the first to write about domestic life, her predecessors assumed male control of the domestic environment, whereas she does not. Sklar's point of reference is nineteenth-century America. In eighteenth-century England Wollstonecraft had already defined a domestic role for women in which they were to be rational, autonomous agents. Nevertheless, if the female role Beecher defines is not entirely new, her elaboration and defense of it are of great interest.

Unlike Wollstonecraft, Beecher presents a detailed account of female education tied directly to the wife-mother role. No discrepancy between education and societal tasks and functions exists for Beecher's women; destined to be homemakers, they are to acquire the knowledge and skill they need to manage a home and rear children. Will this domestic education prepare them to be the citizens Wollstonecraft intends Emily to be? For Beecher the question is irrelevant since she does not want her homemakers to play the dual female role Wollstonecraft posited in 1792.

Beecher's philosophy of female education, like Rousseau's, is a mirror image of Plato's. Whereas Plato is able to design an education in ruling for females because he has detached them from family and children, Beecher is able to design a domestic education for her daughters because she has detached them from the responsibilities and duties of citizenship. On the face of it, Beecher's philosophy appears to represent a return to Rousseau; yet she would surely tell Rousseau that her homemakers are not creatures of guile, that they share Sophie's duties but not her character. Beecher's wife-mothers are to possess Emily's sense, not Sophie's sensibility; Emily's steadfastness, not Sophie's instability; Emily's independence, not Sophie's docility. In sum, although denied the full rights of men, they are to be educated to be rational, autonomous beings—revised Sophies, or Sarahs, as I will call them.

SUBORDINATE WOMEN

The three parties to our conversation thus far would doubtless ask Beecher how she can reconcile a view of women as rational creatures with a theory of society that denies women direct political participation. In particular, Wollstonecraft would remind Beecher that the fundamental strategy of A Vindication is to argue from women's rationality to women's citizenship; Plato would point out that he relies on essentially this same strategy in the Republic when he insists that with respect to ruling the Just State, the possession of reason—not being male or female—is the difference that makes all the difference; and Rousseau would say that in denying Sophie the kind of education that would allow her to participate in the General Will, he too associates rationality with the right to rule. Rousseau and Plato would also warn Beecher that the wife-mother role she envisions for Sarah does not call for rational judgment and autonomous action. Thus, they would argue—and here Wollstonecraft would part company with them—that Sarah is doomed to failure in the very role Beecher assigns her, even as Beecher denies her the role for which her reason would seem to suit her.

How does Beecher resolve the problems to which a theory combining Emily's reason with Sophie's place gives rise? To answer this question we must take seriously both the social and political philosophies contained in A Treatise and its philosophy of female education.

For Catharine Beecher the “great maxim” that all men are created equal and are equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is another mode of expressing the Golden Rule. To love one's neighbor as oneself requires “that each individual of our race shall regard the happiness of others, as of the same value as his own” and forbids “any institution, in private or civil life, which secures advantages to one class, by sacrificing the interests of another” (p. 2). Thus the principles of American democracy are for her identical to those of Christianity. If Beecher were certain that each individual would obey the Golden Rule, she might have seen no need for laws and government. She recognizes, however, that Scripture will not always conquer greed, and so she deems a system of laws necessary to ensure that each individual may pursue happiness “unimpeded by the selfish interests of others.” In Beecher's eyes, then, the state rests on the fundamental principle established by the “Great Ruler of the Universe,” which implies that government and laws be designed with reference not to the wishes of the few but to “the general good of all.”

Monarchical and aristocratic rule are incompatible with Christianity, Beecher says, because they secure advantages to the few by sacrificing the interests of the many. Democratic rule, on the other hand, meets her requirement that the state take into account the “great mass of the people.” It should not be supposed, however, that in approving a democratic form of government, Beecher espouses a nonhierarchical society. The system of laws she considers necessary to secure the good of all must sustain certain relations in social and civil life involving “duties of subordination.” Society could not go forward harmoniously, she says, if “superior and subordinate relations” were not instituted and maintained. Distinctions of rank or station thus constitute the social fabric out of which her ideal democratic polity is cut.

Exactly what relations involving the duties of subordination does Beecher have in mind? She lists magistrate and subject, employer and employed, teacher and pupil, parent and child, husband and wife. In each of these the superior “is to direct, and the inferior is to yield obedience.” And who is to fill the higher and the lower stations in social and civil life? In the case of parents and children the Creator has decided, for He has given children into the control of their parents until they reach a certain age, or as long as they remain members of the household. In other relations, however, Beecher claims that in a democracy the superior or subordinate station is a matter of individual choice. Every domestic, artisan, or laborer can choose “the employer to whom he is to accord obedience or, if he prefers to relinquish certain advantages, he can remain without taking a subordinate place to any employer” (p. 3).³ Every subject has equal power to choose his ruler. No woman “is forced to obey any husband but the one she chooses for herself; nor is she obliged to take a husband, if she prefers to remain single.”

Now, relations of inequality are certainly compatible with political democracy; indeed, they can scarcely be avoided in society. Although even an infant can possess capacities its parents lack—for example, sight or hearing—on a great many measures a small child will be inferior to its parents. A pupil, in turn, will not necessarily be inferior to a teacher with respect to size or any number of other qualities, yet except in very unusual circumstances pupils are not their teachers' equals in their mastery of the area under study. Similarly, in knowledge of medicine patients will often—although by no means always—be the inferiors of their physicians as in knowledge of the law clients will be the inferiors of their attorneys.⁴

Note, however, that Beecher uses the language of subordination, not inequality, in speaking of social relationships and that she characterizes the relation of subordination as one of obedience. One member of the parent-child or teacher-pupil dyad directs; the other obeys. Relations of inequality do not have to be characterized in this fashion. Teachers can be viewed as the guides, advisers, facilitators, helpers of their pupils, and parents as the caretakers or guardians of their children. In these cases, an emphasis on obedience to directives appears misplaced. And the husband-wife relation does not have to be viewed as one of inequality at all, let alone as a relation involving female obedience to male commands. In weaving the social fabric for the democratic state, however, Beecher rejects one of Wollstonecraft's central teachings: her Sarahs are to obey their husbands as willingly as Rousseau expected Sophie to obey Emile.

Beecher's daughters owe obedience to men not only in the marriage relation: whether or not they are married, their social and civil interests are to be entrusted to men. “Women have an equal interest in all social and civil concerns,” Beecher says. But while denouncing any “domestic, civil, or political institution” that sacrifices women's interests in order to promote those of men, she denies her daughters the rights and duties of citizenship. Neither voting, making, nor administering laws is to be their concern. The result of a political order which secures women's interests without their participation “has been fairly tested,” she claims. Quoting Tocqueville's Democracy in America with approval, she portrays a country in which “women never manage the outward concerns of the family, or conduct a business, or take a part in political life” (p. 5).

Given the Christian underpinnings of Beecher's political philosophy, one might have expected her justification of the subordination of women to rely on an appeal to the Supreme Lawgiver, but it does not. Nor does it rest solely on an appeal to distinct male and female natures. Although Beecher cites Tocqueville's reference to the “wide differences between the physical and moral constitutions of man and woman” nature has appointed, in placing her daughters in a position of obedience to their husbands and barring them from full citizenship, she looks to tradition and efficiency. “The Americans,” Beecher quotes Tocqueville as saying, “have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy, which governs the manufactories of our age, 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” (p. 5). Efficiency thus constitutes the test Beecher says tradition has passed.⁵ Shades of Plato, this, for he too makes efficiency a prime social value. In its name, however, he does not exclude women from direct political participation as Beecher does.

Rousseau also excludes women from direct political participation, but there is a significant difference in political status between his Sophie and Beecher's Sarah. Like Sophie, in obeying the law Sarah will be following the commands of others. But at least in Beecher's polity a husband is expected to represent his wife's interests. Thus, although Sarah lacks the political freedom Rousseau assumes to be a good for males, she has a political standing Rousseau denies Sophie. Beecher's daughters are not full citizens, but in requiring their husbands to represent them, Beecher gives women an indirect voice in the laws they must obey. Moreover, in maintaining that women have an equal interest in social, civil, and political concerns and institutions, she acknowledges that although they are not exactly citizens of the state, they are nonetheless to be counted among its members. As much cannot be said for Sophie. Although she is a member of what in The Social Contract Rousseau calls the earliest and only natural society, the family, she is not included in the “moral and collective body” that is the state. The “public person” formed by the union “of all other persons” is “composed of as many members as there are votes in the assembly.”⁶ Sophie has no vote; hence, she does not even belong to that civil state into which the state of nature is transformed by the social compact.

As a participant in the General Will, Emile will be his own legislator even as he obeys the laws of the state. Imagining the duty of obedience to be Sophie's by nature, Rousseau sees no loss of freedom resulting from her subjection to the commands of Emile or the state. Thus, although Rousseau might have required Citizen Emile to represent Sophie's interests when he participates in the General Will, he did not. Instead, Emile must set aside all special interests, including hers.

It may not have occurred to Rousseau, but it did to Beecher that to require a woman to obey her husband's commands seems to conflict with the demands of individual liberty. How else are we to explain her insistence that in a democracy no woman is obliged to take a husband and that every woman who does marry chooses her husband? For a person to have a choice there must be alternative courses of action from which to pick, and for one to make a choice he or she must recognize alternative courses of action as real options. In our own day the pressures to marry are so intense that many women do not entertain alternative life-styles as possibilities for themselves. Even supposing that the pressures were less intense in Beecher's time than they are now, for every independent woman like Beecher, who deliberated at great length before becoming engaged and remained single after her fiancé's untimely death, how many more there must have been who either never saw “spinsterhood” as an option or let others select their mates for them.

Beecher is driven to her assumption of marital choice by her need to reconcile the subordinate place she assigns women in marriage with the demands of liberty. Choice is relevant to this problem: it is often maintained that to the extent that one chooses one's rulers, liberty is preserved. Yet choice of a ruler accompanied by a requirement of obedience to that ruler is scarcely a formula for freedom. It is just this formula that seems to represent the plight of her daughters. For supposing that they do choose their husbands, the doctrine of wifely subordination apparently dooms them forever to a life of conformity to another's orders.

Beecher's appeal to marital choice may not preserve women's freedom, but it marks a very real difference between her theory of women's subordination and Rousseau's. Let us not forget that Sophie does not choose Emile, she is “given” to him. That Beecher's daughters in principle have a choice regarding marriage suggests that they are capable of at least a degree of self-determination. This, in turn, implies that, despite women's subordinate place in marriage and the polity, Beecher attributes to them the capacity for rational self-legislation.

In fact, in the world Beecher envisions women must be capable of reasoning for themselves and acting on their own, for as wives, mothers, homemakers, and “members of a social community” they have grave responsibilities. It is true that they are required to obey their husbands, yet the responsibilities Beecher assigns women are theirs alone. Moreover, she makes it clear that to carry them out well women must attain a high degree of skill and intellectual achievement and must be prepared to exercise judgment and take independent action. The duties belonging to Sarah could not possibly be fulfilled adequately by Sophie. It is not merely that Sophie's education would not provide her with the necessary knowledge to carry out the tasks Beecher describes. It would make Sophie too dependent on Emile's commands to be her own legislator even in the role that is peculiarly hers.

SARAH'S EDUCATION

The title of Beecher's book is as misleading as Rousseau says Plato's title is. Just as the Republic is an educational treatise as well as a political one, so A Treatise on Domestic Economy sets forth not only a theory of domestic management but a theory of female education. In Beecher's presentation the two are interwined, since, in her view, female education constitutes a preparation for carrying out the domestic role. Nonetheless, it is possible—and important—to disentangle these two elements in her thought, for while Beecher delineates the tasks and functions belonging to the domestic role, her views on education clarify both the way the tasks are to be done and the character of the women who are to perform them. Recent commentary on Beecher has tended to pass over the educational aspects of her work; yet it is only when her proposals for female education are taken seriously that the innovative and perhaps even radical nature of her philosophy can be appreciated. It is only then that Sarah can be distinguished from the women portrayed in the magazines and religious tracts of the period.⁷

Historian Barbara Welter has summed up the mid-nineteenth century's ideal woman, saying that “the attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors, and society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman. Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them she was promised happiness and power.”⁸ Welter does not herself cite Beecher's writings, but the four cardinal virtues will be familiar to readers of A Treatise, for they are as essential to Beecher's Sarah as to the True Womanhood Welter describes. Because they are, it has been easy for historians to view Beecher's work as simply providing the theoretical underpinnings for an ideology that confined women to the home and reinforced their political subjection.⁹ Yet to do this is to lose sight of the fact that the four cardinal virtues do not spell Sarah, as Welter says they spell True Womanhood.

That they do not becomes clear when one compares Sarah to Meg March, Louisa M. Alcott's example of True Womanhood. The oldest of Alcott's “little women,” Meg possesses piety, purity, and submissiveness in an abundance surpassed only by her younger sister Beth. But although Beth takes pleasure in doing small domestic tasks, she wants only to play the piano and stay home with father and mother. It is Meg who exemplifies the kind of domesticity that is the concern of the cult of True Womanhood. “Why don't you say you'd have a splendid, wise, good husband, and some angelic little children? You know your castle wouldn't be perfect without,” says Jo, whose own castle in the air consists of a stable full of Arabian horses, rooms piled with books, and a magic inkstand for writing the novel that will bring her fame and fortune.¹⁰

In disposition and temperament Meg is as domestic as the proponents of the Cult of True Womanhood could wish, but when she marries John Brooke, she does not possess the domestic skills she needs to keep his house. The catastrophe of the currant jelly testifies to her ineptitude: Meg spends a long, miserable day picking, boiling, straining, reboiling, resugaring, and re-straining jelly that never jells while racking her brain to remember what she has left undone. Thus Meg falls short of Beecher's ideal homemaker. Such a catastrophe could never happen in Sarah's home. Long before she marries she will have undergone an apprenticeship in domestic tasks, something Meg apparently never had to do. More important, in the unlikely event that the jelly fiasco occurred in Sarah's household, she would not give way to the tears, petulance, and anger Meg displays when, surrounded by the mess she has created, she discovers that John has brought a friend home to dinner. In Beecher's vision of women, rational self-control joins piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity as a fifth cardinal virtue. Deriving from a kind of education Meg is never given, Sarah's self-control distinguishes her from the True Woman of Beecher's day, even if her early mastery of domestic skills and arts does not.

An understanding of Beecher's views on education allows us to perceive the great gulf between Sarah and Welter's True Woman; it also makes possible an interpretation of the two apparently conflicting theses in Beecher's rather complex philosophy: her thesis of women's subordination and her thesis of female control of the domestic environment. It is only when we grasp Sarah's mastery of the theoretical knowledge underlying the True Woman's domestic skills that we can be sure of Beecher's sincerity in asserting her second thesis. Furthermore, it is only when the educational dimension of A Treatise is probed that we can begin to appreciate her claims for the societal importance of the domestic role and hence for the equality of women.

In the first pages of A Treatise Beecher affirms the subordination of wives to their husbands, yet she ultimately leaves no doubt that her daughters are to be in charge of the domestic environment. Emily is to be in charge of this environment, too, but Sarah's position is different from Emily's, for Beecher's social vision greatly magnifies the importance of home and family. Beecher does not simply show how many and varied are women's tasks. By setting the domestic environment within the larger societal context, she reveals both its social and its political significance. Sklar's interpretation is helpful here.¹¹ Beecher, she says, points to domestic experience “as a focus around which a new and unified national identity could be built.” Thus, the domestic sphere is for Beecher “not so much removed from as central to the national life.” Beecher considers the home “an oasis of noncommercial values in an otherwise acquisitive society,” but at the same time domestic activities and processes are directed toward the improvement of that society.

Given the strict limits she places on female participation in the larger society, one might expect Beecher to have prescribed a course of study designed simply to enable women to carry out narrow, specific household tasks in rote fashion. To the contrary, the education she would give Sarah is to be both broad and deep: Sarah is to undertake the kind of liberal course of study Wollstonecraft seeks for Emily plus a specialized curriculum in domestic economy. Moreover, this is to be accompanied by a vigorous program of physical education, for, like Plato, Beecher is certain that a strong mind in a weak “casket” is of little use.

“As a general rule,” Beecher says, “daughters should not be sent to school before they are six years old; and when they go, far more attention should be paid to their physical development” (p. 26). They should never be confined for more than an hour at a time, she adds, and any such confinement should be followed by sports in the open air “at all seasons, and in all weathers.” Until a girl is fourteen or fifteen the principal object of her education should be “to secure a strong and healthy constitution”—something Beecher perceived to be sadly lacking in the women of her day—“and a thorough practical knowledge of all kinds of domestic employments.” During this time, “intellectual culture” should not be totally ignored, but it should be of secondary importance: “Such a measure of study and intellectual excitement, as is now demanded in our best female seminaries, ought never to be allowed, until a young lady has passed the most critical period of her youth, and has a vigorous and healthful constitution fully established” (p. 27).

Beecher gives mothers primary responsibility for the early physical and domestic education of girls. “Less time should be given to school,” she says, “and much more to domestic employments” (p. 26). A child of five or six can assist her mother in household tasks, and “if properly trained, by the time she is ten, she can render essential aid.” Even in the wealthy classes “all the sweeping, dusting, care of furniture and beds, and clear starching and the nice cooking, should be done by the daughters of a family, not by hired service” (p. 27). For this domestic apprenticeship Beecher provides a twofold justification: the daughters will acquire essential skills, and, since their time will be spent in active employments, “a strong and healthful constitution” will be secured.

If for Beecher a sound constitution is the major aim of early female education, mental discipline is the main objective of the systematic three-year course of study she then prescribes. After condemning the influence of the ordinary boarding school “on health, manners, disposition, intellect, and morals,” she presents an account of her ideal institution in the form of a detailed sketch of the Monticello Female Seminary in Alton, Illinois. There is no need, Beecher says, to propose “a theory, which may, or may not, be approved by experience,” for an institution already exists that “will give an idea of what can be done, by showing what has actually been accomplished” (p. 31). Needless to say, this model institution makes ample provision “to secure adequate exercise for its pupils.” It requires that two hours a day be spent in domestic employments and introduces a system of calisthenic exercises combined with music. Its main feature, however, is its liberal curriculum, which includes mathematics, language, philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, botany, geology and minerology, intellectual and moral philosophy, political economy, the evidences of Christianity, geography, and history.

The liberal studies Beecher recommends for Sarah are to be rigorous as well as extensive. “The same textbooks are used as are required at our best colleges,” she notes with approval. Moreover, in history “a more complete knowledge is secured, by means of charts and textbooks, than most of our colleges offer,” while in geography “the largest work, and most thorough course, is adopted.” To this demanding curriculum, adapted from male colleges—mathematics, for example, is to include “the whole of Arithmetic contained in the larger works used in schools, the whole of Euclid, and such portions from Day's Mathematics as are requisite to enable the pupils to demonstrate the various problems in Olmsted's larger work on Natural Philosophy” (p. 35)—is to be added the study of vocal music and linear drawing, as well as of certain texts in physiology, technology, and archaeology.

The first object of this education, which ranges across the intellectual disciplines, is not the amassing of information but the development of what today would be called the skills and attitudes of critical thinking and problem solving. “Many persons seem to suppose, that the chief object of an intellectual education is the acquisition of knowledge,” Beecher says, “but it will be found, that this is only a secondary object.” Rather, she says, “it is the formation of habits of investigation, of correct reasoning, of persevering attention, of regular system, of accurate analysis, and of vigorous mental acts, that are the primary objects to be sought” (p. 34).

Why, since she denies the duties and responsibilities of citizenship to women, does Beecher claim for Sarah the very education aimed at the development of reason and rational self-discipline that Wollstonecraft claims for Emily? She offers two responses. The first is that women's arduous domestic duties “demand not only quickness of perception, but steadiness of purpose, regularity of system and perseverance in action” (p. 34). The second emerges from a close examination of the branch of study she calls “Domestic Economy.” This subject was not a part of the curriculum of Beecher's model institution nor of other schools. Indeed, her object in writing A Treatise was to show the need “for introducing Domestic Economy as a branch of female education to be studied at school” (p. 41). Thus as she justified its inclusion in a female education, she was constructing a new field.¹² Chapters 5 to 40 of A Treatise set forth the content of the new subject under chapter headings such as “On Clothing,” “On Healthful Food,” “On Whitening, Cleansing, and Dyeing,” “On Social Duties,” and “On Management of Young Children.”

Why should this subject be incorporated into female education? The first reason Beecher gives is its usefulness: at some time or other every female will be called upon to perform the duties to which domestic economy is directed. Furthermore, it cannot be assumed that young ladies will master this body of content in any other way. “What proportion of mothers are qualified to teach a proper and complete system of Domestic Economy?” she asks. “What proportion of those who are qualified have that sense of the importance of such instructions and that energy and perseverance which would enable them actually to teach their daughters in all the branches of Domestic Economy presented in this work?” And she asks, “How many mothers actually do give their daughters instruction in the various branches of Domestic Economy?” (p. 43).

To the objection that domestic economy cannot be taught through books, Beecher replies that young ladies learn chemistry this way and asks, “Why, then, should not that science and art, which a woman is to practice during her whole life, be studied and recited?” To the further objection that, if studied, domestic economy will be forgotten, she replies that much of everything studied in school will be forgotten; “Why should that knowledge, most needful for daily comfort, most liable to be in demand, be the only study omitted, because it may be forgotten?” (p. 44). To still another objection that young ladies could learn domestic economy simply by reading the books on their own, she replies, “And so they can get books on Chemistry and Philosophy, and study them out of school; but will they do it? And why ought we not to make sure the most necessary knowledge, and let the less needful be omitted?” (p. 45).

An education in domestic economy is not merely claimed for Sarah in A Treatise, it is created for her, and it is not reducible to simple skill training. Sarah is expected to acquire her domestic skills during long apprenticeship to her mother. Her formal study of domestic economy is designed to build upon that apprenticeship by providing her with a set of rules or principles of action to guide domestic practice and, more important, with a grasp of the theoretical knowledge upon which those principles rest. Thus, for example, Beecher says at the beginning of her chapter on the care of health: “There is no really efficacious mode of preparing a woman to take a rational care of the health of a family, except by communicating that knowledge, in regard to the construction of the body, and the laws of health, which is the first principle of the medical profession” (p. 48). There follow detailed descriptions of bones, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and organs of digestion and respiration, accompanied by illustrations. Chapter 6, on healthful food, contains an even more elaborate account of the digestive organs, and chapter 8, on clothing, discusses details of circulation. Throughout A Treatise principles and technical knowledge are intermixed.

Although A Treatise was a best-seller in its day, it is not a superficial how-to manual—a purveyor of skill without understanding. Beecher believes that the principles governing the domestic environment can be applied properly only by one who understands the reasons for them. In the matter of health care, for example, a woman need not have a physician's training, “but she should gain a general knowledge of first principles as a guide to her judgment in emergencies when she can rely on no other aid” (p. 48). In the matter of healthful food, a woman should know that at least five hours should elapse between meals because the stomach requires three hours for labor and two for rest. Once she understands this she can take into account unusual circumstances such as the need very young, healthy, and active children may have for “a more frequent supply of food.” In the matter of infant care, a woman should have “a knowledge of the wonderful and delicate construction of the several organs of life, and of the causes which operate to produce their diseased action” (p. 218), on the one hand, because physicians are rarely consulted until some damage is done, and on the other, because intelligence and information is required to obey physicians' directions.

Besides the principles of domestic practice, Beecher's subject of domestic economy includes a body of knowledge drawn from sources ranging from anatomy, chemistry, and botany to architecture, child development, and moral philosophy. A grasp of both practical and theoretical elements is necessary if Sarah is to carry out her domestic duties. If she acquires only the background knowledge upon which the principles rest, she will not know what to do; if she simply learns the principles of action, she will not know how to apply them wisely.

Beecher, then, prescribes a curriculum in domestic economy that will give Sarah the expertise to carry out the complex wife-mother role successfully. But the question remains: if this specialized study will make Sarah an expert homemaker, what grounds are there for claiming Emily's liberal education for her? Beecher's answer, that a liberal education has “transfer” value, should be familiar to those today who seek to justify liberal studies. What interests Beecher are the qualities of mind and character that Sarah will presumably derive from her liberal studies. In her view, Sarah will need these if she is to combine theory and practice intelligently in both the learning and the performance of her domestic duties.

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DOMESTICITY AND REASON

It is understandable that Sarah's education, like Emily's, stresses the acquisition of knowledge, reasoning power, self-discipline, and independent judgment at the expense of the development of the gentler emotions. These emotions were genderized in favor of females in Wollstonecraft's and Beecher's society, as they are in ours. Historically, traits associated with females have been considered to be inferior virtues at best. Wollstonecraft dare not include the development of the gentler emotions in Emily's education lest Emily be denigrated for possessing qualities that are thought to detract from her rationality and hence from her capacity to carry out the duties of citizenship. Nor does Beecher dare to include it, lest Sarah fail to be respected in her capacity of homemaker. After all, Beecher's position is not just that women's role is at least as important to the good society as men's but that it deserves equal respect.

Actually, Beecher's position is that the domestic role deserves equal respect provided that, in carrying it out, women do not behave as “mere technicians” acting under the direction of men. Beecher is assuming that were their husbands to make the difficult domestic decisions, they and not their wives would be the ones to merit respect. The argument sounds plausible, but in view of McMillan's praise of nontheoretical expertise and of Mrs. Poyser's sovereignty in her kitchen and dairy, we must ask if, like Wollstonecraft in another context, Beecher has not committed the fallacy of false dilemma. Is Beecher wrongly assuming that the only alternative to Sarah is Meg March, a person of superficial skill and uncertain judgment? Does not Mrs. Poyser, a highly successful, skilled practitioner, represent another alternative?

There is no doubt that for all her noise and inefficiency, Mrs. Poyser, not her husband, has control over her family's domestic environment—or at least over those aspects of it considered the province of women. Moreover, she commands not only her husband's respect but her community's as well. Thus, insofar as Beecher thinks that to manage a domestic environment and be respected for it a woman must necessarily have theoretical learning, she is mistaken. In domesticity, as in navigation, authority can derive from an expertise gained through apprentice learning and firsthand experience.

However, while Mrs. Poyser's skills are such as to earn her respect and give her autonomy in her sphere of activity, they will not make her a better domestic practitioner than her predecessors or allow her to improve upon their practice. Like the Trukese navigator and the British wheelwright, Mrs. Poyser works within a tradition. Her training is essentially conservative—or, perhaps one should say, preservative: its object is to equip her to do exactly as her forebears did and, eventually, to teach her successors to do as she does. Beecher, however, is critical of traditional domestic practice. Her aim is that it be done better in the future than it has been in the past. Thus she would persist in denying that Mrs. Poyser represents a viable alternative to Sarah even while having to acknowledge Mrs. Poyser's domestic sovereignty at the Hall Farm.

Of course, one need not agree with Beecher's poor opinion of mid-nineteenth-century domestic practice. However, her emphasis on the theoretical intelligence required by good domestic practice is motivated only in part by her interest in improving it. The primary reason lies in her larger project of challenging a value hierarchy that places political above domestic activity. Although she rejects the most central features of Wollstonecraft's philosophy—the citizen role for women and egalitarian marriage—in her own way Beecher is as much a rationalist as Wollstonecraft is. Thus, while McMillan may be satisfied to discern a different but equal kind of intelligence at work in domestic affairs, Beecher is not. Just as Wollstonecraft believes that in order to extend to women the rights of men she must show that females possess the same kind of rationality as males, so Beecher believes that in order to extend to the female role the value attributed to the male role, she must show that domestic activity requires the same kind of rationality as political activity. Beecher may believe in different but equal roles, but in her philosophy, role equality is premised on the unity of reason.

Recognizing that the Western tradition values abstract, theoretical, deliberative reason over concrete, practical, intuitive judgment, and perceiving only the latter in domestic practice, McMillan proposes that if we are to acknowledge the value of domestic activity, we must change our attitudes toward reason itself. In contrast, Beecher would have us realize that domestic practice rests on a scientific base and thus requires the exercise of the abstract, theoretical, deliberative reason we value most. No wonder she claims for her daughters the liberal education her sons are to have. The assumption that their different roles require the same kind of intelligence is central to her philosophy, and she, like Wollstonecraft—and ultimately like Plato—assumes that the way to develop this kind of intelligence is through a liberal education.

In claiming this education specifically in relation to the wife-mother role, Beecher accomplishes something that neither Plato nor Wollstonecraft does and something Rousseau certainly does not do. Plato does not need to reconcile female reason with the domestic role, for those women who possess reason will not marry, maintain a household, or engage in child rearing. Rousseau does not need to do this either since his women are not meant to be rational beings. Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, does need to provide an account of female education that acknowledges reason in domestic affairs, but it is Beecher, not Wollstonecraft, who succeeds in this task. By ignoring Plato's Difference Postulate Wollstonecraft more or less by default extends the education she designs for citizenship to the domestic role. Beecher takes this postulate seriously, however, and develops an education for domestic affairs founded on the application of reason.¹³

Thus Beecher goes well beyond Wollstonecraft's initial insight that rationality is important to the proper disposition of domestic matters. She has a richer conception of the way reason functions in domestic affairs. In Wollstonecraft's philosophy one can know one's duties only through the use of one's reason; in relation to domestic affairs, however, rationality plays essentially a preventive role: it provides the self-control and self-discipline a woman needs to hold onto her husband, run her household, and bring up her children. By keeping women from being slaves to their senses, reason will keep mothers from being lost in the coquette, domestic servants from being tyrannized, children from being spoiled. Given Wollstonecraft's project of rejecting Sophie, this account is appropriate. But in Beecher's account of domestic affairs reason has a positive role to play in that domestic activities themselves require the application of theoretical knowledge to practical judgment.

Many modern readers of A Treatise would no doubt accuse Beecher of mystifying the domestic role, thereby making it more palatable to the women she confines in it. It is important, however, to distinguish the effect her theory of domestic economy may have had on her readers from the internal logic of her philosophy. In elaborating her thesis of female control, her thesis of the significance of women's role, and the different-but-equal thesis, Beecher's book may have served in its day to “pacify” women. Nonetheless, A Treatise is a remarkable philosophical achievement. In making clear that women are to be as much their own legislators in domestic affairs as men are in political matters, and that the domestic environment poses problems so difficult and challenging that both a liberal and a professional education are required of its practitioners, Beecher is able to conclude that women's tasks and functions ought to command the respect that men's do. Rich maintains that if women are to learn to love themselves they need not only trust and tenderness but a strong sense of “self-nurture,” by which she means a sense of respect and affection for their bodies and a feeling of pride in being female.¹⁴ Beecher's social and educational philosophy is designed to instill this pride.

Of course, since for all her professional competence, Sarah is just as dependent economically on her husband as Meg is on John Brooke and as Wollstonecraft's Emily is on hers, it is possible—perhaps even highly likely—that it will be difficult for him to respect Sarah's domestic activities. Even if he does, Sarah's economic dependence ultimately must place her at the mercy of his whims. Similarly, her political dependence on her husband may also serve to create a gap between the respect she deserves for her activities and that which she is actually given. In addition, Beecher may be unrealistic in attributing so much causal efficacy to people to whom she denies full political rights, people she places in a subordinate station. She may be unrealistic in supposing that the rougher emotions she discerns in the world outside the home will have less effect on the domestic environment than that environment has on the outside world.

Even so, in forging a causal chain in which women constitute the decisive link in the creation and maintenance of the good life and the good society, Beecher explicitly gives both women and the domestic form of life an importance few philosophers ever have. I say “explicitly” because it can be argued that Beecher's causal chain was forged earlier by Rousseau. But what is implicit in his account of Sophie and Emile and certainly not intentional becomes explicit in Beecher's social philosophy as reason and domesticity are consciously joined together. Furthermore, if Beecher has her way, Sarah's economic and political dependence on a man will no more prevent her from being perceived as his equal than will his domestic dependence on her. Indeed, Beecher's whole point is that men and women are dependent on one another. This is Rousseau's point, too, although in his paeans to Emile's autonomy he often loses sight of it, but whereas Rousseau deprives Sophie's role of the rationality the Western tradition values so highly, Beecher makes that rationality its most striking feature.

A Treatise is all the more remarkable because Beecher claims a liberal education for Sarah even though she wants to deny her the rights and duties of citizenship. Plato justifies a liberal education for women on the ground that it develops the rational mind people need to be rulers of his Just State, and Wollstonecraft also bases the case for women's liberal education on the citizen role. Beecher, however, realizes that another justification is possible. Construing liberal education very much as Plato and Wollstonecraft do and embracing Plato's Functional Postulate, she extends what has traditionally been men's education to women so that they will carry out well the societal role that has traditionally been theirs, not men's. This is an important switch, for if Beecher's daughters are to be teachers of the young and the continuing educators of their husbands, they must have not only the rational powers of mind she sees as the outcome of a liberal education but also the knowledge and breadth of vision such an education can yield. Recall our fear that Sophie will manipulate Citizen Emile to her own private ends. In view of Sarah's education in intellectual and moral philosophy, history, and political economy, this fear is unjustified. Sarah's domain may be domestic, but her education is liberal in both scope and purpose.

But Sarah's education is specialized as well as liberal, and therein lies whatever substance the charge of mystification has. Does the exercise of good judgment in domestic matters really require a detailed knowledge of anatomy, physics, chemistry, and the like? In view of the complex decisions even those who simply shop in a supermarket must make today, the answer to this question is not self-evident. Obviously, in the last years of the twentieth century both the principles of action and the background knowledge contained in A Treatise are outmoded, although readers of such publications as Nutrition Action and the Tufts University Diet and Nutrition Letter as well as members of the home economics profession will be sympathetic toward Beecher's endeavor. The question remains if those who, for instance, plan meals must possess all the knowledge these publications bring to bear on this single domestic task. And if this question receives an affirmative answer, the question then arises whether an adequate practical grasp of this material requires formal study.

In any case, it must nonetheless be acknowledged that in stressing the relevance of the various theoretical disciplines to domestic practice, Beecher shows us that domestic activity, which has traditionally been considered to belong to women, and theoretical learning, which has traditionally been considered to belong to men, do not after all stand worlds apart. This insight eluded both Plato and Rousseau, and McMillan's book testifies to the fact that even now Beecher's point is far from being our commonplace.

Both the philosophy of education and the social philosophy Beecher develops in A Treatise contain numerous insights. This is not to say that we should embrace a vision of the social order in which women are denied direct political participation or are required to be homemakers. But there is more to Beecher's social and political theorizing than might at first be realized. If her sex-based division of tasks and functions is to be rejected—as it surely should be—there is still a great deal to be learned from her philosophy. When Sklar says that by the end of A Treatise the domestic sphere is central to the national life she is correct. Beecher's ideal is not a stereotypical two-sphere society in which one distinctly inferior sphere, the domestic, supports the other, the public or political, which is then taken to constitute the whole of civil society. In Beecher's vision the domestic and the public spheres together constitute civil society, and there is interaction between them. It is taken for granted, of course, that men's economic and political activities will affect home and family, but for Beecher the primary flow of influence between spheres moves from the domestic to the public, and hence from women to men.

We have seen that this flow of influence from women to men may be impeded because Beecher neglects Sarah's education in the gentle emotions. Like Wollstonecraft, Beecher claims a one-sided intellectualistic education for women and for the same reason. True, Beecher rejects for her daughters the citizen role Wollstonecraft demands. Yet, she wants the wife-mother role to be as valuable as any societal role; and while her philosophy makes her daughters subordinate to their husbands, she wants them to be respected for being wives and mothers. Thus, even as Wollstonecraft feels that she must stress female rationality to show that women deserve to be citizens, Beecher feels that she must do so to show that their traditional duties are valuable and deserve respect. Beecher, then, has a twofold task: she has to show that women's reason can be developed through education; she must also show what McMillan claims is not acknowledged even today—namely that homemakers need reason.¹⁵

Beecher's educational philosophy deserves criticism for being onesided and also because it makes no provision for the special ways in which males must be educated to be husbands and citizens. In the context of Beecher's thought, what good will it do to give women a professional education in domestic economy if men are not educated to be rational husbands? Why should men be expected to promote the civil interests of their wives and daughters if they are not educated to take women's concerns seriously? Can the diffusion of the gentle emotions through the population—if that is what Beecher really wants—be accomplished if men are not educated to reject their culture's identification of softness and femininity, toughness and masculinity? We can assume that Beecher's sons will receive a liberal education: after all, Sarah's liberal education follows the course of study used in the male colleges of Beecher's day. But that liberal education cannot be depended upon to foster a recognition of their wives' claims to autonomy in domestic matters, to respect for their domestic activities, or to an equal interest in all social and civil matters, let alone an appreciation of traits genderized in favor of females.

The gaps in Beecher's theorizing are very real, but we must not allow them to blind us to her remarkable achievement. Focusing on Emile's dependency on Sophie, rather than on Sophie's dependency on Emile, she carves out for her daughters a realm of theoretical and practical reason in which women are self-governing agents and claims for them an education to match. In so doing, she accomplishes for domestic affairs what Rousseau has long been acclaimed for accomplishing for politics. Rejecting Plato's program of assigning all but the rational few to a life of obedience to the guardians of the Just State, Rousseau develops an egalitarian theory of politics—at least for males—in which every man is his own legislator. Reconciling individual freedom and the obligation a citizen has to obey the law by means of the concepts of personal autonomy and the General Will, he then constructs a theory of citizenship education whose purpose is to foster the development of independent reason and with it the capacity of self-government in affairs of state. Rejecting Rousseau's assumption that only half the population is capable of the kind of rationality required for self-governance, Beecher develops an egalitarian theory of domestic life in which every woman is assumed to possess the capacity for reason and hence to be capable of being her own legislator. Reconciling female autonomy in the home and woman's obligation to obey her husband's commands by means of the concept of professional expertise, Beecher then constructs a theory of domestic education whose purpose is to foster the development of professionalism in domestic affairs.

Unless we decide to follow Plato's lead and abolish the reproductive processes of society from women's lives, we would do well to take seriously the spirit, if not the details, of the education Beecher constructs for Sarah. Even if women do not finally opt for Sarah's professional preparation in domestic economy, we should at least entertain the possibility that for those who must share, if not shoulder, responsibility for carrying on society's reproductive processes there might be subject matter to be claimed that does not fall within the boundaries of a traditional liberal education, and also that Sarah's self-legislation in domestic affairs might have value for women even today.

We tend to take it for granted that although liberal education is defective in its portrayal of women, it is nevertheless the only place for them to look in claiming their education. If we learn nothing else from Beecher's participation in this conversation, she at least teaches us to broaden our sights so as to contemplate including within the education women claim what she would call domestic economy. But there are more lessons to be learned than just this one. One of the most important is that the domestic role traditionally assigned women is of overriding significance, particularly in its educative aspect, and demands as much intelligence as any other societal function. If this role is to be carried out well and if those performing it—be they women or men—are to be able to think and act intelligently and independently, a preparation combining theory and practice is as important for it as for the role of citizen.

Notes

1. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (New York: Schocken Books, 1977). Page references will henceforth appear in parentheses in the text.

2. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 152, 153.

3. Beecher's naiveté with respect to workers' options in a capitalistic society is apparent here. The discussion to follow will bracket this issue, however, in order to concentrate on her apparent optimism about women's options in respect to marriage. For a discussion of Beecher's class, racial, and ethnic prejudices, see Gerda Lerner, ed. The Female Experience (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1977), pp. 262-63.

4. Which is not to say that patients have no knowledge to contribute to the healing process or that clients ought not to be consulted in matters of law.

5. Apart from citing the authority of Tocqueville, however, Beecher gives no reasons for supposing that a sex-based division of labor is efficient, let alone that it is more efficient than some other organization of labor.

6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1947), pp. 6, 15-16. A close examination of the role Beecher gives Sarah vis-à-vis the state suggests that our political vocabulary is not adequate to the task of describing women's place. One certainly has to use circumlocutions here to get at what Beecher is saying. Of a woman in the early years of the American Republic, Linda K. Kerber says: “She was a citizen but not really a constituent” (Women of the Republic [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980], p. 283). See also Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1980), p. 299.

7. Barbara Welter bases her account of the Cult of True Womanhood in large part on these materials (“The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon, 2d ed. [New York: St. Martin's, 1978]).

8. Ibid., p. 313.

9. See, for example, Nancy F. Cott, ed., Roots of Bitterness (New York: Dutton, 1972), pp. 11-12; Lerner, ed., The Female Experience, pp. 121-22; Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 189. Judith A. McGaw, in “Women and the History of American Technology,” Signs 7 (1982):816, refers to the assumption of scholars “that Beecher and Stowe were traitors to their sex who consigned women to tedious housework.”

10. Louisa M. Alcott, Little Women (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1936), p. 167.

11. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, pp. 158-61.

12. For discussions of Beecher's role in creating the subject home economics, see Charlotte E. Biester, “Prelude—Catharine Beecher,” Journal of Home Economics 51 (1959):549-51; James M. Fitch, “When Housekeeping Became a Science,” American Heritage 12 (1961):34-37. For a general discussion of the construction of school subjects, see Jane Roland Martin, “Two Dogmas of Curriculum,” Synthese 51 (1982):5-20.

13. Recall, however, the overlap between Sarah's education and her husband's. To say that an educational theorist embraces the Difference Postulate is not to say that for different societal roles he or she prescribes entirely different educational programs.

14. Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 248. It should be noted that Beecher's rigorous program of physical education for females is designed to promote the health of women's bodies—something sadly neglected in her day—if not actually an affection for their bodies.

15. The home economics profession is, of course, based on Beecher's premise.