[ICJ 8.

2 (2009) 43-51]
ISSN 1472-2089




Womens Sphere and the Public Square:
The Beecher Sisters Dilemma Over Slavery


Karen Fisher Younger


ABSTRACT

The Abolition Movement challenged the nineteenth century cultural norm that
separated women and men into separate spheres of life; private and domestic for
women, public and political for men. Abolitionists, male and female, publically and
radically challenged the institution of slavery. The Beecher sisters, members of the
enormously influential Beecher family, were progressive regarding slavery but were
not willing to challenge nineteenth century cultural norms. So, what role should they
and other women play in the struggle against slavery? They threw their influence
behind the conservative Colonization Society, believing such activism did not exceed
the bounds of female propriety. In this way, two influential and progressive women
with a conservative platform exerted profound influence in the public square. The
northern churches shared the Beecher sisters progressivism with conservative
methodology. As a consequence, after the Civil War northern Christianity lacked the
moral energy to combat racism in the south and the north.

In civil and political matters, women take no interest,
1
wrote Catharine
Beecher in 1842. That is unless, of course, you are Catharine Beecher.
Catherine would have insisted throughout her life that she practiced what
she preached, that she did not overstep the bounds of female influence
predicated on what people at the time called Gods immutable laws.
But she also devoted much of her adult life to expanding womens
influence in American society, as did her sister Harriet.
In the early nineteenth century most Americans defined womens role
as domestic and private, separate from the world of public life. More
than this, it was thought woman was morally and spiritually purer
precisely because she stayed away from the corrupting public sphere. It
was during this time womens traditional domestic roles at home as
wives and mothers took on a sacred quality. And this separate spheres
ideologyone private for women and the other public for menwas
perceived as immutable law from God.
Historians have noted how the ideology of separate spheres ironically
expanded womens influence in the public sphere. Because women were
naturally morally and spiritually superior to men, Catherine and
countless other nineteenth-century women, believed they were uniquely

1
Catharine Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, (Boston: T.H. Webb, 1842), p. 33.
International Congregational Journal 44
qualified to contribute to the morality of society generally. Convinced
that the values they upheld in the home qualified them to become both
the conservators and final arbiters of morality in society generally, large
numbers of women began to move into organized benevolent work,
founding orphanages and homes for the widowed, establishing maternal
associations and tract societies. Most female associations did not run
their own meetings. When they met for an annual gathering, ministers
and male leaders called the meeting to order, read the womens annual
report, and gave the speeches and sermons to the audience.
2

All this was fine and good until the small but strident abolition
movement reared its radical head. For the abolition movement didnt
follow the rules. They advocated incredibly radical ideas. (1) Force the
federal government to reinterpret a Constitution that clearly sanctions
and protects slavery.
3
(2) Ignore the precedent of recent history in the
northern states where emancipation occurred gradually and was initiated
by state governments. (3) Ask southerners to willingly give away
millions and millions of their dollars invested in slaves (one slave was
worth in our dollars about $10,000). There was no compensation for slave
owners under the abolitions plan. (4) Ask the white, racist American
public to welcome into their communities and workplaces millions of
black Americans whom they sincerely believed to be inferior. And,
finally, argued abolitionists, free all slaves right now. To add insult to
injury abolitionists also advocated egalitarian principles, allowing women
such as Angelina and Sarah Grimke to stand before audiences of men and
women and address them on the subject of slavery, insisting that women
had the same right as men to speak out publicly.
4


2
The scholarship on domesticity is vast. See, for example, Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work:
Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990); Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, (New Haven: Yale University, 1977);
Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in 19
th

Century America, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Lori Ginzberg, Women
and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19
th
Century U.S., (New Haven:
Yale University, 1990), Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex & Class in New York, 1789-1860,
(Champaign: University of Illinois, 1987).
3
Sec. 2, Art. 1: apart from free persons all other persons, (meaning slaves) are to be counted
as three-fifths of a white person for the purpose of apportioning congressional representatives
on the basis of population; Sec. 9, Art. 1: the importation of such Persons as any of the States
now existing shall think proper to admit, (meaning captured Africans), would be permitted
until 1808; Sec. 2, Art. IV: persons held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws
thereof, escaping into another, (meaning fugitive slaves), were to be returned to their owners;
Fifth Amendment of Bill of Rights (1791) guaranteed that no person could be deprived of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law. Interpretation: slaves were property, and
slaveholders had an absolute right to take their property with them, even into free states or
territories.
4
The literature on abolitionism is vast. See for example, David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage,
(New York: Oxford University , 2006); James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From
Reconstruction to the NAACP, (Princeton: Princeton University, 1994); Eric Foner. Free Soil, Free
Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1970).
Fisher Younger Womens Sphere and the Public Square

45

Here lay Catharine and Harriets dilemma. They, like most
northerners, believed slavery was morally wrong and should end. But
what should be the role of women in this very political and public cause?
The Beecher sisters were born into one of the most famous and
controversial families in the nineteenth century. Lyman Beecher, the
father and patriarch of the clan, dedicated his life to religious orthodoxy.
All told, he produced four daughters and seven sons. All seven sons
would follow their father into the ministry, but the pulpit was not an
option for the Beecher sisters. Shut out of the Congregational pulpit and
church leadership, the sisters would need to find a different platform
from which to make their views heard.
And so they did.
In many ways Catharine defined for a generation what it meant to be a
woman. Her life from start to finish is a story of ambition and
achievement. From 1829-1849 she was more widely known than either
her sister Harriet or her brother Henry Ward, both of whom rose to fame
in the political storm over slavery in the 1850s. She was the national
authority on female education and a nineteenth century domestic
virtuoso. In 1841 she published A Treatise on Domestic Economy, an
astonishingly comprehensive book that covered all aspects of the home,
from how to design and build a house to how to cook, sew, and bring up
children. The book was a huge success, being reprinted 15 times, almost
every year in the 1840s and 1850s.
5

In many ways, Catharines life was tangled with paradoxes. She
positioned herself squarely within the confines of separate sphere
ideology, identifying true womanhood with the family and motherhood.
But she never married, never bore children, and never possessed a
permanent home. Beecher advised women to induce change only by
gentle influence, yet like a steam roller she plowed across the North,
rebuking her enemies even as she irritated family and friends. She was a
renowned pioneer in American womens schooling but did not like to
teach, which she described to her father as drudgery. She opposed the
womens rights movement and female suffrage, yet argued for the
economic independence of women, or as she put it, to train woman for
her true business and then pay her so liberally that she can have a house
of her own whether married or single.
6
She believed women should not
speak publically to mixed audiences, but had no qualms about writing
editorials that attacked abolition and penning books that confronted
Calvinism and attacked the authority of the ministry. She could never
claim a conversion experience and came to believe that salvation was
possible without one, but hosted revivals at her school and encouraged

5
Katheryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1973).
6
Quote in Jeanne Boydston, The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Womens Rights and
Womans Sphere, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988), p. 13.
International Congregational Journal 46
her students to seek the Calvinist rite of passage. Born into one of the
most important and influential Congregational families, she converted to
Episcopalian (as did Harriet).
7

And Harriets influence was also extraordinary. Her Uncle Toms
Cabin was a social phenomenon and, arguably, the most influential novel
in American history, selling more copies than any other book in the
nineteenth century except the Bible. Her book galvanized northern public
opinion on the slavery question. In fact, the novels impact was global.
Among those who hailed it as a masterpiece were Victor Hugo, Leo
Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Lord Palmerston.
8

But Uncle Toms Cabin was essentially a conservative book that in fact
irritated many of her abolitionist readers. It was domestic ideals that
inspired Stowe. Her intense opposition to slavery was fueled by what she
recognized to be slaverys destructive impact upon the family. And her
solution to the slave problem was conservative. Stowes vision for ending
slavery consisted of mass conversions of slave-owners who voluntarily
freed their slaves. Stowe thought unacceptable any political or military
solution that forced Southerners to free their slaves. Essentially a
religious tome, not a political one, she hoped to rally the nations women
into becoming a force for the eradication of slaverys evils. Two years
later, she argued in Appeal to the Women of the Free States that mens
perceptions are obscured by ambition and the love of political power,
but God had endowed women with a knowledge in those holier
feelingspeculiar to womanhood, and which guard the sacredness of the
family. The avenues woman could take to intervene were few, denied
the exercise of direct political power. Nonetheless a woman was still
bound to give influence on the right side.
9

Both Catharine and Harriet, like the majority of white northerners,
took a cautious position on slavery. The question was never whether
slavery should end. They agreed with the majority of Congregationalists,
Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Unitarians that slavery was
morally wrong and must end. The question was how to bring about the
end. Catharine and Harriet were certainly anti-slavery but they were not
abolitionists, the small but strident group that advocated the unequivocal
and immediate end of slavery, whatever the consequences. In fact the

7
For more on the paradoxes of Catharines life see the outdated yet most comprehensive
biography by Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher, a study in American domesticity, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).
8
On Harriet Beecher Stowe see Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
9
On domesticity and Uncle Toms Cabin see Jane Tompkins, Sentimental Power: Uncle Toms
Cabin and the Politics of Literary History, Glyph 8: pp. 79-101; Jane Tompkins, Sensational
Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985), pp. 122-146; Gillian Brown, Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in
Uncle Toms Cabin, American Quarterly 36 (Fall 1984), pp. 503-23; Harriet Beecher Stowe, An
Appeal to the Women of the Free States, Independent (February 23, 1854), p. 57.
Fisher Younger Womens Sphere and the Public Square

47

overwhelming majority of northern Americans rejected the extreme
positions of abolitionism.
So here was the Beecher sisters dilemma. What role should women
play in the very political and public issue of slavery, made more
controversial by the small but strident abolitionists who encouraged
womens visible and vocal presence? Clearly, Catherine wasnt going to
stand on the sidelines and watch women like he Grimke sisters challenge
her national standing. She would need to make her opinion known on
the subject.
In 1837 Angelina Grimke, the famous female abolitionist, handed
Catharine her opportunity by announcing her plans to tour the North and
form abolition societies among northern women. Catharine immediately
challenged Angelinas leadership and defined her own counterproposal
for the role of women in Americas struggle against slavery in An Essay on
Slavery and Abolitionism.
She wrote,

I know not where to look for northern Christians, who would denythat the holding
of our fellow men as property, or the withholding any of the rights of freedom, for
mere purposes of gain, is a sin, and ought to be immediately abandoned.

This sounds a lot like an abolitionist. But she goes on to say it was the
Souths responsibility to end slavery. Southerners must be awakened to
the moral evil themselves. Abolitionists are merely preaching to the
choir, why convince men of the sins of other persons, she asked. More
than this, abolitionists are willfully encouraging strife and disunion:

the character and measures of the Abolition Society are not either peaceful or
Christian in tendency, but that in their nature they are calculated to generate party-
spirit, denunciation, recrimination, and angry passions[and] it is wrong for a
Christian, or any lover of peace, to be connected with it.
10


Catharine believed abolitionism especially malicious to women.
Abolitionist activity was inappropriate for females because it bound
women in partisan politics and throws a woman into the attitude of a
combatant. She argued that womens power must never be exerted
directly (as active abolitionism would have required), for to do so would
associate women with self-interest and deprive them of the high moral
ground of self-sacrifice. Woman is to win every thing by peace and
love, she insisted, by making herself so much respected, esteemed and
loved, that to yield to her opinions and to gratify her wishes, will be the
free-will offering of the heart. She then called on all women to not join in
the cause or if they had, quit their association: every female instantly

10
Catharine Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with reference to the Duty of American
Females, (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1837), pp. 6-7, 10-13, 17.
International Congregational Journal 48
relinquish the attitude of a partisan, in every matter of clashing
interests.
11

Here is how Catharine described Fanny Wright, an advocate of such
radical ideas as abolition and womens rights:

There she stands withher great masculine person, her loud voice, her untasteful
attire, going about unprotected, and feeling no need of protection, mingling with men
in stormy debate, and standing up with bare-faced impudence, to lecture to a public
assembly.
12


So Catherine following her fathers lead, threw her support behind the
conservative anti-slavery plan of the American Colonization Society.
The colonization movements aim was the resettling of black
Americans in Africa, but the motivations of its adherents varied. Some
saw their efforts as a way to end slavery by encouraging Southerners to
manumit their slaves. Others supported colonization as a way to rid
America of black Americans. Believing free blacks a threat, colonization
provided a legal means of removing them from the United States. Still
others acted out of deep religious convictions. Colonization, it was
believed, would reform America by ending slavery and Christianize
Africa by sending black American Christians as missionary emigrants.
Many members hoped to evangelize Africa and make amends for the
injustices perpetrated by the United States.
Supporters of colonization seem like crackpots today, but at the time it
made sense to many Americans. In fact it was vastly more popular with
antebellum Northerners than abolition societies. Its leading men included
clergy, college presidents, and politicians of all parties. Among the
officers of the society over the years were Daniel Webster, William
Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and Abraham Lincoln.
What was the appeal of colonization? (1) It represented a gradual
emancipation plan that was marked by compromise and reconciliation.
(2) It invited Christians to intensify their sacred mission of global
conversion. It seemed to make sense of the providential meaning of
slavery (God allowed Africans to be enslaved in order to be Christianized
and returned home).
For Catharine colonization provided her a proper avenue for anti-
slavery activism. Colonization supporters argued that female
colonizationists were uninterested in the politics of slavery. They
supported colonization because they were interested in the reformation of
Africa, primarily through assisting educational efforts in the country.
Colonizationists explained that female educational efforts reflected
peaceful and disinterested benevolence and unlike abolitionist efforts
were not divisive, combatant. Colonization women were not like the
abolitionist women who stepped outside the bounds of propriety.

11
Beecher, An Essay on Slavery, pp. 100-101, 102.
12
Catharine Beecher, Letters on the Difficulties of Religion, (Hartford: Belknap, Hammersly,
1836), pp. 22-23.
Fisher Younger Womens Sphere and the Public Square

49

Philadelphias Ladies Liberian Association, the group Catharines female
colonization society supported, put it this way:

While it belongs to the male part of a population to determine the political
institutions of a country, it falls chiefly into the hands of females, by early education
and domestic training, for giving these institutions permanence.

They concluded, therefore, that their educational efforts in Liberia would
produce

no prejudicesagainst them,

and they hoped

to enlist the sympathies of all, as the importance of education is universally
acknowledged.
13


Harriet, too, seemed to favor colonization. In the 1830s Harriet wrote
Geography for Children,
14
an enormously successful book that went through
multiple editions and was reissued in 1855. The book points to Liberia,
Africa (the relocation settlement of colonized black Americans) as the best
example of progress in Africa. And in 1851, she wrote to Frederick
Douglass to modify his thinking on two issues: his claim that the
American church was proslavery, and his rejection of the viability of
African colonization. And, of course, there is the ending of Uncle Toms
Cabin, in which all the major black American characters go to Africa. The
novel portrays Africa as the promised land of the ancient Exodus
narrative: the place of black redemption. Stowes protagonist, George
Harris, explained it this way: I want a country, a nation, of my ownAs
a Christian patriot, as a teacher of Christianity, I go to my country, my
chosen, my glorious Africa! And so, Harriet has him take his wife, his
children, his sister, and mother to Liberia. The illustrated edition
captures the mythical quality Africa had come to enjoy for many white
Americans. The final picture shows thousands of unidentified blacks in
Africa prostrate with hands lifted toward heaven. In a sunburst of light
above the mountains are the words: Freedom to Africa.
15

The ending was a great disappointment to abolitionists and black
Americans. As one unnamed African American writer argued at the time:


13
Second Annual Report of the Ladies Liberia School Association, (Philadelphia: Lydia Bailey,
1834), p. 10. The annual reports are located at The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
14
Harriet Beecher Stowe, First Geography for Children; and A New Geography for Children,
(Boston, 1855).
15
Harriet Beecher Stowe to Frederick Douglass, July 9, 1851, in Annie Fields, Life and Letters of
Harriet Beecher Stowe, (Boston, 1897; reprint: Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p.
406. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Toms Cabin, (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 467-70;
Uncle Toms Cabin, Illustrated edition, Original designs by Hammatt Billings; Engraved by
Baker and Smith, (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1853).
International Congregational Journal 50
Uncle Tom must be killed; George Harris exiled! Heaven for dead Negroes! Liberia
for living mulattoes. Neither can live on the American continent. Death or
banishment is our doom.

Abolitionist criticism of the evil influence of the last chapter caused
Harriet to clarify her position insisting she was not a colonizationist.
16

And I believe her. At the time of Harriets writing, the American
Colonization Society (ACS) was in sharp decline. It had become clear to
most Americans that it was not feasible to transport millions of black
Americans to a continent that the majority did not want to go to. The
plan was simply too expensive and complicated.
17

And yetthere was something about the idea of African Americans
going away that appealed to many Americans. Even as the ACS declined
as a dynamic movement and despite the fact that most Americans
understood the schemes sheer impossibility, the idea of colonization and
the image of Africa as the promised land for black Americans remained
popular among white Americans. Even Abraham Lincoln and others in
Congress, while the Civil War raged, held out hope for a black exodus.
To many white Americans, this image of Africa as the promised land for
black Americans helped soothe racial fears even as it encouraged a
profoundly racist dream of an all white society.
All of which leads me to my conclusion. Both Catharine and Harriet
illustrate the blending of seemingly contradictory ideas. Both were
progressive women that used the conservative platform of domestic
ideology to expand their own influence, and by extension, they helped
expand other white womens influence in the public sphere. In an era
that did not allow women to pray publically, they both brought their
deep religiously rooted moral convictions to bear on public life.
And they shared some important limitations. They were both middle-
class white women speaking to other middle-class white people. Their
notions of white superiority trumped religious conviction in the equality
of the races, and so the sisters found it difficult to consider a peaceful
multiracial society of equals.
The Christian hurch, too, embodied the Beecher sisters
contradictions. Northern Christians contributed significantly to
encouraging the federal government to emancipate slaves. But when the
tide of freedom swept across the country in 1865, the Church proved

16
C.V.S., Provincial Freeman, Toronto, (July 22, 1854); The Thirteenth Annual Report of the
American & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, (New York: American and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society, 1853), pp. 192-93, located on-line at www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/africam/
afar64dt.html.
17
On the colonization movement see P.J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement,
1816-1865, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Amos Beyan, The American
Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State: A Historical Perspective, 1822-1900,
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991); Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution,
(Gainesville: The University of Florida, 2005); Claude A. Clegg III, The Price of Liberty, (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
C
Fisher Younger Womens Sphere and the Public Square

51

remiss in helping blacks obtain the fullest measure of freedom. The rush
to reconciliation, the drive for reunion of North and South, trumped
issues of race and racism in American life.
White ministers, leaders, and churches claimed a new solidarity across
geographic lines at the expense of racial reform. Rather then help black
Americans obtain the fullest measure of freedom, too often they turned a
blind eye to lynchings and affirmed segregation and Jim Crowe. The
racial ideology that undergirded the foreign missions of late nineteenth
and twentieth century was inimical to any commitment of Protestants to
racial justice.
Henry Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe called for a quick national
reconciliation after the war. Stowe even moved to Florida where she
raved about her new home as an earthly heaven graced with harmonious
race relations and resorted to black stereotypes to justify her pleas for the
abandonment of Reconstruction. Dwight Moody, a former antislavery
activist, contributed mightily to overcoming sectional hostility at the
expense of black Americans. The evangelist discouraged social activism
and depoliticized the Civil War. His revival crusades in the South were
highly popular, in no small part because he acquiesced in segregation and
disfranchisement and preached that forgiveness of southern whites was
divine. Frances Willard, another antislavery supporter who became
president of the Womens Christian Temperance Union in 1879, traveled
frequently in the South and enlisted thousands of white women in her
war for sobriety and suffrage. She supported disfranchisement of black
male voters and asserted that their ignorant ballots endangered
temperance. She marched under the Womens Christian Temperance
Union campaign slogan, No North, No South, No Sectionalism in
Politics. Like Stowe, Willard endeared herself to the South through
voluble talk of harmonious race relations when they were actually at their
worst.
18

Although the war freed slaves and gave black Americans a claim to
citizenship and black Americans men the right to vote, it did not provide
the moral energy required for rooting equal rights in American society. It
would take another revolution led principally by black American clergy
during the Civil Rights movement to change public policy. Whether
hearts have been changed is another story.


18
For more on race and religion after the Civil War see Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White
Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University, 2007).
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