Laura Cutter
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Catherine Beecher and Mary Lyon: Two Early Educators
“When you choose your fields of labor go where nobody else is willing to go.”-Mary Lyon
In the summer of 1828, a letter was delivered to Miss Mary Lyon in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The sender was Catherine Beecher, daughter of the prominent Presbyterian minister, Lyman Beecher. In 1863 Dr. Leonard Bacon would say, "This country is inhabited by saints, sinners and Beechers.” But in 1828, Harriet Beecher (Stowe) had not yet begun her writings that would move a country toward abolition; young Henry Ward Beecher was not yet considered the “Shakespeare of the pulpit;” and Isabella Beecher (Hooker) had not yet begun her crusade for women’s suffrage. Nonetheless, the Beechers were a household name, and Catherine Beecher had already begun her life’s work as a scholar and educator. Given the family’s prominence, it may be that Mary Lyon could guess the substance of the message when she saw the name of the sender.
The letter is Catherine Beecher’s request to Mary Lyon that Lyon join Beecher in Connecticut and teach at the Hartford Female Seminary. When Beecher wrote to Mary Lyon, Lyon and her mentor Zilpah Grant were establishing the Ipswich Seminary, which would become a leader among the female seminaries of the time. Lyon would later leave Ipswich and found the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which in turn became Mount Holyoke College. Catherine Beecher, an advocate of higher education for women, was in the process of founding the Hartford Female Seminary in Greenfield, Connecticut. The two schools were founded the same year—1828. Lyon’s reputation as an educator, administrator, and protégé of Grant’s had already made her a fine reputation. Though sources indicate that Lyon helped Beecher develop the school, she did not accept the invitation to be an assistant to the principle of the Hartford Female Seminary. It is also unclear how much assistance Lyon offered Beecher, as it has been established that Beecher was a remarkable administrator who found teaching, “drudgery.”
It was only seven years later, in the mid-1830s, that Mary Lyon separated herself from Zilpah Grant and the Ipswich Seminary and began imagining a seminary for women that would allow her to reach a broader base—an endowed academy that would be open to students from wider socio-economic class backgrounds. Catherine Beecher opened the Hartford Female Seminary—without Mary Lyon—in 1828, with several of her young siblings, including Henry and Harriet as students. However, education may not have been Beecher’s sole goal. Barbara White has observed, “it could be argued that before Catherine found herself a renowned pioneer in American women’s schooling she was simply devising an elaborate rationale for correcting the defects in her own education.” Indeed, before the Hartford school opened, Catherine’s brother Edward tutored her in Latin and chemistry. After the school began to flourish, Beecher became restless and moved out west with her father and formed the Western Female Institute, which quickly faced bankruptcy due in part to Beecher’s alienation of the local populace, who refused to send their daughters to her school.
See the Letter
Other Prominent Educators
- Mary McLeod Bethune: Founder of Bethune-Cookman College in Florida, advisor to President Roosevelt, and founder of the National Council of Negro Women
- Elizabeth Blackwell: The first woman in the world to receive a medical degree.
- M. Carey Thomas: President of Bryn Mawr College, also ensured that Johns Hopkins University Medical School would be open to women students on an equal basis with men.
- Hallie Quinn Brown: Dean of Women of Tuskegee Institute, teacher in public schools and universities, lecturer, and organizer for civil rights and equal rights for women.
- Maria Mitchell: First professional woman astronomer in the United States and was a professor of astronomy at Vassar College.
- Emma Willard: Founder of the Troy Female Seminary (now the Emma Willard School), a pioneer in women's education.
Useful Links
External
National Women's History Museum
The Story of American Public Education (PBS)
An American Family: The Beecher Tradition
Visit my website here: It's more of the same!
Internal
Images of Mary Lyon and Catherine Beecher
