Catharine Esther Beecher

Catharine Esther Beecher (1800–1878) was an American educator and writer, the eldest child of the preacher Lyman Beecher and the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. After her fiancé drowned in 1822 she devoted herself to the education of women, founding the Hartford Female Seminary and later schools in Cincinnati and the Midwest and campaigning for women as teachers. Her Treatise on Domestic Economy of 1841, a textbook for housekeeping as a profession, went through many editions, and The American Woman's Home, written with her sister in 1869, extended it. She opposed women's suffrage while arguing for women's authority in the home and the school.