The Limits of Sisterhood

The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere

Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, Anne Margolis

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780807842072, 9780807817681
• eBook ISBN: 9781469648903
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In a century almost continually at odds with the proper place of females, Catherine Esther Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Isabella Beecher Hooker shared a commitment to women's power. Although they did not always agree on the nature of that power, each in her own way — Catherine as educator and author of advice literature; Harriet as author of novels, tales, and sketches; and Isabella as a women's rights advocate — devoted much of her adult life to elevating women's status and expanding women's influence.

1.
Introduction

THIS is a book about three nineteenth-century American women—three females in a society dominated by males, three sisters and daughters in one of the nation’s most illustrious (and controversial) families, and three children of an old religious elite that was struggling to extend its dominance into a new epoch. Together, the lives of Catharine Esther Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Isabella Beecher Hooker spanned the entire nineteenth century, chronicling the astonishing range of activities that engaged the energies and loyalties of white, middle-class women and demonstrating how those interests changed over time. Separately, they suggest the private experiences, the relationships, and the individual successes and conflicts that helped shape a century of women’s history.

These would be reasons enough for a book—but there is another. During a century when people were almost continuously at odds over the proper place of females, Beecher, Stowe, and Hooker shared a commitment to women’s power. Each in her own way—Catharine as an educator and writer of advice literature, Harriet as an author of novels, tales, and sketches, Isabella as a women’s rights activist—devoted much of her adult life to elevating women’s status and expanding women’s influence in American society. Moreover, each ultimately achieved a position from which to make her views heard, and each contributed to the ideas of womanhood that have been carried into the twentieth century. These three women were certainly not the only Victorians to influence America’s ideas of gender. And yet the white middle class of which they were a part exerted a significant influence over larger cultural norms, and white middle-class women in the Northeast played particularly visible roles in the nineteenth-century debate over woman’s sphere. Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Isabella Beecher Hooker were among the most prominent of these. How they understood their experiences, how they generalized from them to the experiences of American women as a group, and how they formulated their goals registered in the lives of women across the country. Thus, this is a book about three visionsof female power, and the implications of those visions for American women.

Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Isabella Beecher Hooker formed their perspectives on womanhood in a society aflame with the zeal of reform. Early nineteenth-century religious disestablishment had opened the way for a flowering of sects, cults, and denominations. In the antebellum decades, the religious millennialism of the second Great Awakening gave rise to an extended network of benevolent reform associations and, only slightly later, to the abolition and temperance movements that in turn became training grounds for the women’s rights movement. During the same period, utopian communities tested alternative forms of economic and social organization, and dietary reformers, mesmerists, hydropathists, and animal magnetists offered new treatments for America’s health.

Catharine, Harriet, and Isabella were all participants in this era of reform. Born in 1800, Catharine pioneered the expansion of educational opportunities for women early in the century, not only enhancing the academic curriculum for students at her three seminaries, but also insisting that women head such institutions. Particularly in the field of teaching, Catharine played an important role in the development of increased professional opportunities for women. Meanwhile, she wrote extensively on health, dietary, and dress reform, on the proper design and operation of the American home, and on the shaping of American culture.

Harriet, eleven years Catharine’s junior, shared her elder sister’s interest in women’s education, women’s health, and, most importantly, women’s role in the family. Unlike Catharine, she supported the postbellum demand for female enfranchisement in an effort to broaden women’s influence in society. But it was as a writer that Harriet made her most important contributions to nineteenth-century reform. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin she mounted a singularly powerful assault upon the scourge of nineteenth-century America, the institution of slavery. Her intense opposition, which found eloquent expression in the novel, was fueled by what she recognized to be slavery’s destructive impact upon the family. In both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and subsequent essays, she especially sought to rally the nation’s women into becoming a force for the eradication of slavery’s evils. Harriet continued to elaborate in later novels, tales, and sketches upon the idea of woman as the redemptive force in American society.

Virtually a generation younger than Catharine, Isabella eventually became the most outspoken advocate of woman suffrage among the Beecher clan as well as an exponent of spiritualism, an increasingly popular alternative to traditional Protestantism. After years of immersion in domesticity, she emerged as a national leader in the agitation for women’s rights during the postbellum period. Isabella soon earned widespread recognition as a result of her keen abilities as an organizer and as a constitutional debater in print and at the podium. However, she gained unwanted notoriety as a result of her defense of controversial fellow suffragists, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Victoria Woodhull.

The Beecher sisters’ involvement in the reform movements of the nineteenth century came to them almost as an inheritance from their father, Lyman Beecher, one of antebellum America’s most prominent ministers. In an autobiography compiled a few years before his death in 1863, Lyman recalled that six decades earlier he had found himself “harnessed to the Chariot of Christ, whose wheels of fire have rolled onward, high and dreadful to his foes, and glorious to his friends. I could not stop.”¹ His words provided an appropriate epitaph not only for himself and his seven sons, all of whom became ministers, but for three of his four daughters as well. Like their father, Catharine, Harriet, and Isabella remained harnessed to the chariot. Not simply witnesses to the social and cultural transformations that characterized their century, the Beecher siblings were engaged and influential participants.

Lyman Beecher’s career as a reformer emerged in the context of his deep involvement in revivalism.² Like other evangelical Protestants, Beecher joined the sacred and secular. Considering human beings responsible for their individual salvation, he insisted that they also hold themselves responsible for the salvation of society. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, he matched deed to word when he rallied his flocks and New England’s clergy to oppose dueling and then to support the fledgling cause of temperance. The next crusade took Beecher and most of his family to Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Seminary early in the 1830s. Shortly after he assumed the presidency of Lane, Beecher found himself caught between the school’s abolitionist students and the outraged board of trustees, who demanded that all antislavery discussion cease. Lyman aligned himself with the trustees, informing the students late in 1834 that they must submit to the regulations or leave the seminary. Beecher retained his presidency—and nearly lost his institution. The “Lane rebels,” who included almost all of the students, abandoned Lane for Oberlin College, leaving the sixty-year-old Beecher struggling to keep Lane’s doors open until his retirement fifteen years later in 1851.

Although Lyman Beecher had declared that a cause should be advocated “only in so far as the community will sustain the reformer,” his own career was enmeshed in controversy.³ In this respect, too, Catharine, Harriet, and Isabella followed in his footsteps. In 1850 Catharine published Truth Stranger than Fiction. Offered as a defense of her former student, Delia Bacon, who was said to have encouraged an improper relationship with Congregational minister Alexander MacWhorter, the volume amounted to a sustained assault upon the integrity of New England’s Congregational clergy. The resulting criticism of Catharine was intense, but it paled before the reponse to Harriet’s “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life,” published by the Atlantic Monthly in 1869, and Lady Byron Vindicated, issued a year later. Vilified on both sides of the Atlantic because her article made public the speculations about Lord Byron’s incestuous relationship with a half sister, Harriet remained committed to vindicating Lady Byron and herself. Only two years later, Isabella was caught between loyalty to another suffragist and to her family. In November 1872, Victoria Woodhull, a women’s rights activist notorious for her advocacy of free love, publicly charged Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with having committed adultery with Elizabeth Tilton, his parishioner and wife of his closest friend. The resulting ecclesiastical and civil trials generated national headlines on an almost daily basis. Alone among the Beecher siblings, Isabella openly questioned her brother’s innocence.⁴

Catharine, Harriet, and Isabella’s prominence in the reforms as well as the controversies of nineteenth-century America cannot be ascribed solely to their family legacy, however. They were also actors in one of the most profound shifts in gender relations in the course of American history—the influx of white middle-class women into organized social reform. Even prior to the Revolution, Americans had begun to associate women’s traditional domestic role with particular attributes, the most important of which was piety. In the early nineteenth century, that association was elaborated into a set of gender conventions identifying woman with her duties to the family in the home. The “cult of domesticity,” as historians have termed this perspective on womanhood,⁵ was not in fact a single belief system, but rather a malleable group of ideas that ascribed to women, as wives and especially as mothers, a special capacity for nurturance and benevolence.

The ideology of domesticity functioned in part as a rationale for segregating women in their own “separate sphere” and as a rebuttal to those who were attempting to extend equal rights arguments to women. Yet domesticity turned out to have unexpected implications. By attributing to women precisely those values that seemed most endangered by the dislocations of early industrialization, domesticity provided the framework within which Catharine, Harriet, and Isabella, as well as countless other nineteenth-century women, organized to reform American society. Convinced that the values they upheld in the home uniquely qualified them to become both the conservators and the final arbiters of morality in society generally, large numbers of antebellum women began to move into organized benevolent work, establishing maternal associations and tract societies; founding orphanages and homes for the aged and widowed and unwanted; and raising money for direct relief—food, fuel, and clothing—for the urban poor. Some immersed themselves in the great reform movements of the nineteenth century, including abolitionism and temperance. Implicit in such activism was the conviction that the female experience represented a cultural alternative to the materialism and competitive individualism of industrial capitalism.

Domestic ideology thus offered one rationale for expanding woman’s sphere and increasing female influence. Indeed, by encouraging women to see themselves as a separate group and by providing the aegis under which women learned organizational skills and assumed an enlarged role in social reform, domesticity may well have functioned as a precondition for nineteenth-century feminism. Certainly, at least one argument for the expansion of women’s legal and political rights was that effective moral guardianship required these tools. But domesticity was not the only philosophical framework within which nineteenth-century women sought power within American society. The women’s rights movement itself was rooted as well in an alternative analysis, natural rights theory, the belief that all citizens had legal and political rights as individuals. As it was applied to women, this equal justice argument emphasized women’s personhood, instead of imputing any special mission to their gender.

Domesticity and natural rights theory were based on logically opposed premises about the nature of women, and over the course of the nineteenth century, they appeared to vie as competing rationales among those who sought to improve women’s social, economic, legal, and political status. Yet the two approaches to women’s struggle for self-determination were seldom kept entirely distinct. Although the organized women’s rights movement is generally dated from the 1848 convention in Seneca Falls, New York, nineteenth-century feminism emerged at least a decade earlier, when abolitionists like Angelina and Sarah Grimke insisted upon their right as moral beings to stand before audiences of men and women and address them on the subject of slavery.⁶ Castigated for stepping out of woman’s proper sphere, the Grimkes justified their actions by invoking both egalitarian and domestic principles. They insisted that women had the same rights as men to speak out publicly, and yet they also argued that, as women, white females bore a special obligation to their black sisters to oppose the desecration of family life and womanhood under slavery.

In differing ways, each of the Beecher sisters also illustrated this blending of seemingly contradictory premises. Catharine was an early advocate of domesticity with its emphasis upon the shared experiences of womanhood. Yet she opposed female suffrage in part because she believed that all women were not the same—and certainly not equally qualified to vote. Harriet based her demand for women’s legal and political rights on the grounds of woman’s distinctive mission as the reformer of her society—but she buttressed that demand with the insistence that women were individuals with the same rights and responsibilities as men. The combination of natural rights theory, with its definition of women as citizens, and domestic ideology, especially the emphasis upon sexual solidarity among women, reached its culmination in Isabella. She meshed legal and constitutional arguments for women’s social and political equality with a profound conviction that, because of the power inherent in motherhood, woman alone embodied the higher morality through which American society was to be purified and reordered.

As they frequently coexisted in a single analysis, so versions of domesticity and natural rights theory shared some important limitations. Neither fully addressed the diversity of experience and circumstance of nineteenth-century American women. Emphasizing a shared experience, domesticity obscured the individuality of women’s lives. As Catharine, Harriet, and Isabella demonstrated so well in their respective positions on woman suffrage, even women who shared a common class, race, and family affiliation could reach very different conclusions about the same issue. On the other hand, a singular focus on women’s natural rights as political beings ignored much that women did hold in common, and especially the structural inequities in American society between men and women. As Catharine recognized in her repeated warnings about female vulnerability, women and men did not compete for power as equal individuals, but as heirs of a system of dominance and subordination based upon gender. Finally, neither of these frameworks necessarily addressed the creation of a more just or humane society for all its members. The exclusive focus upon gender entailed in domesticity helped to conceal the significance of the sharp conflicts of interest and condition fostered by nineteenth-century economic expansion. Especially, it helped to hide the meaning of class and race in American society. Similarly, the movement for women’s rights and woman suffrage repeatedly compromised its avowed commitment to the rights of all individuals. In their factional struggles and in their search for widespread social support, some suffragists narrowed their vision from the empowerment of all women to that of white, native-born women of the middle and upper classes. The degree to which and in what ways the activism of nineteenth-century white middle-class women (proceeding from domestic or natural rights premises or a combination of the two) brought lasting change to American society is a question we must each answer for ourselves. In this book, we have sought to offer a context in which a part of that evaluation can occur.

In an effort to preserve the integrity of Catharine’s, Harriet’s, and Isabella’s lives and writings while also establishing a common framework to facilitate comparison and analysis, we have divided the material on each of the sisters into three parallel sections. In “Shaping Experience,” we not only describe the experiences that fashioned the adult but also suggest how each woman perceived these experiences and attempted to form them into a mature perspective on what it meant to be female in nineteenth-century America. The sections on “The Power of Womanhood,” then, are intended to present those perspectives. We have chosen the word “power” because they did—because at the core of each sister’s thinking was a commitment to the idea that womanhood carried with it a particular and unique agency for shaping American society. We have used the word “womanhood” because all of these sisters articulated their beliefs in the context of all females, arguing in effect for the existence of a transcending bond among all women. In “The Politics of Sisterhood,” we test those bonds, examining the implications of their perspectives for the sisters themselves, as individuals and as sisters, and exploring the ramifications for women of other classes and races.

We have not included a separate section on the fourth Beecher sister, Mary Beecher Perkins (born in 1805), and that decision warrants some explanation. Our interest has been in tracing, not only individual lives, but the tension between individual lives and certain general ideas of womanhood as they evolved and changed over the century. To that end, Catharine, Harriet, and Isabella offered particular advantages, since all three participated actively in the public debate over those ideas and experienced the personal implications of the gender system. Perkins did not participate in that debate. Indeed, she passed her life in almost deliberate obscurity; as she wrote to Isabella in 1841, “I could not perform any of my duties if I gave way to my feelings and allowed myself to attend meetings and become as much interested as I easily could.”⁷

And yet Mary Beecher Perkins was an important figure in Beecher family history. She contributed to the success of Catharine’s first school, provided boarding for both Catharine and Harriet, helped to raise Isabella, and carried on cor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• Part I Shaping Experience
• Part II The Power of Womanhood
• Part III The Politics of Sisterhood
• Part IV Conversations Among Ourselves
• Index