Catharine Beecher: Preparing Women as Teachers

low and conditions demanding, teaching gave middle-class women an opportunity for careers outside the home. Until the Civil War, most rural schoolteachers were men. By 1900, however, 71 percent of rural teachers were women.

5-3d catharine Beecher: preparing women as teachers

In the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Willard, and Susan B. Anthony led the movement for women’s suffrage and educational equality. Prominent among these leaders was Catharine Beecher (1800–1878), a teacher educator, who connected the common school to women’s education.17 Beecher founded and operated the Hartford Female Seminary, in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1823 until 1831. She then created the Western Female Institute as a model for teacher-education institutions.

Teaching, Beecher reasoned, provided educated women with a socially useful career at a time when their access to higher education and the professions was severely limited. Importantly, it made women financially independent and gave them the opportunity to shape future generations morally.

Envisioning elementary-school teaching as a woman’s profession, Beecher contributed to the feminization of elementary teaching. Women’s colleges would open higher education to women and prepare them to staff the growing public-school system.18 She argued that ninety thousand teachers were needed to bring civilization to America’s untamed western frontier.19 Beecher was part of a network of women educators such as Emma Willard, Zilpah Grant, and Mary Lyon who prepared women for teaching careers.

Beecher had clear ideas about preservice preparation and classroom practice. In their preservice preparation, students would study evangelical Christian morality, discuss the civilizing mission of women as teachers, and observe experienced teachers.20 In practice, women teachers needed to use their “sensibility,” their intuitive insights, about children to manage their classrooms, teach a common curriculum that encouraged literacy and civility, and serve as moral mentors.

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horace mann

& Pho tog rap hs Division [LC-USZC4-7396] s t n P r i Lib rar y of C on gress 17Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976), p. xiv. Also, see Barbara A. White, The Beecher Sisters (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 18Catharine Beecher, An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers (New York: Van Nostrand & Dwight, 1835), pp. 14–18. 19Ibid., p. 19. 20Ellen C. DuBois and Lynn Dumenil, Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2005), pp. 139–141.

1819 Valedictorian of graduating class at Brown

1816 Enters Brown university 1827 Election to Massachusetts house of Representatives

1796 1803 1810 1817 1824

1796 Born in Franklin, Massachusetts

> Photo 5.1 The small rural school also served as a cultural center for the community.

The Granger Collection, NYC

The One-room School In much of the country, especially in the rural areas of farms and small towns, the typical public school was a one-room building in which a single woman taught boys and girls, ranging in age from 6 or 7 to 16 or 17 (Photo 5.1). The local school district, with its single one-room school, could act as almost a direct democracy in which an elected school board set the tax rate and hired and supervised the teacher.21 Or some board’s members might be local tyrants, arbitrarily imposing their rules and regulations on teachers and students.

21A web presentation on the one-room school is “One Room Schools: Michigan’s Educational Legacy,” Clarke Historical Library, (Mount Pleasant: Central Michigan University).

1831

1833 Election to Massachusetts Senate

1837 Appointed Secretary of Massachusetts Board of Education

1838 Writes first of ten annual reports on education

1838 1846

1848 Elected to uS house of Representatives

1852 President of Antioch College in ohio

1859 Death

1853 1860

On the Western frontier, the one-room log school was often the first community building constructed. By the 1870s, wood-frame schoolhouses, painted white or red, replaced the crude log structures. These improved buildings, heated by woodburning stoves, included slate blackboards and cloakrooms. The teacher’s desk stood on a raised platform at the front of the room where there were portraits of George Washington, and in the northern states, Abraham Lincoln. Many classrooms had large double desks that seated two pupils. Later, these often were replaced with single desks, each with a desktop attached to the back of the chair in front of it. Thus, all the desks were immovable and arranged in straight rows, one behind the other.22

The pupils, ranging from age 6 to 17, studied a basic curriculum of reading, writing (penmanship), grammar, spelling, arithmetic, history, geography, music (singing), drawing, and hygiene (healthy living). Teachers typically used the drill and recitation method in which a student or a small group of students would come to the front of the room and recite a previously memorized passage from a textbook. Later in the nineteenth century, teachers who attended normal schools began to use Pestalozzi’s object lessons and simultaneous group instruction. Some teachers (such as Helen Parkhurst, an innovative teacher educator) experimented with progressive methods in which some of the students worked individually on their lessons while she worked with others in small groups. Schools emphasized the values of punctuality, honesty, hard work, and patriotism. The rural one-room schoolteachers, expected to be disciplinarians as well as instructors, had “to be their own janitors, record keepers, and school administrators.”23 For more about one-room schools, see the Technology @ School box.

Teacher certification was simple but chaotic in that each board issued its own certificates to its teachers, which other districts often refused to recognize. Today’s more uniform state certification and accreditation by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) is a step toward greater professionalization for teachers. Many small districts were consolidated into larger ones in the early twentieth century, as described in Chapter 7, Governing and Administering Public Education.

22Wayne E. Fuller, One-Room Schools of the Middle West: An Illustrated History (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994), pp. 7–19, 18–27, 30–40. 23Ibid., p. 61.

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catherine Beecher

Y C N , n The G ran ger C ol l ect i o

1790

1800 Birth

1800

1821 Teacher in New haven, Connecticut

1823–1831 Founder, principal, and teacher of hartford Female Seminary

1829 Publishes Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education

1831 Begins campaign for more schools and teachers on the Western frontier

1832 Establishes Western Female Institute