BEECHER, Catharine E.

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Woman's Profession as Mother and Educator, with Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage. First edition thus of the educational theorist's argument for the prioritization of the domestic sphere over suffrage. Beecher believed "professional training for the female tasks of homemaking [was] a teaching comparable to professional training for male tasks such as business or law" (Turpin, p. 139). It was originally published the year before in Hartford as Woman Suffrage and Woman's Profession, retained on the half-title here.Beecher (1800-1878) was the founder of the Hartford Female Seminary, one of the first significant educational establishments for women in the US. Her works "advocated 'domestic feminism' - that is, expanded power for women within domestic life and ancillary power in the wider society... Beecher's stance was not really shaped by her opposition to woman suffrage - a cause that she never felt passionately about one way or another. Instead, she was motivated primarily by the new platform that suffrage provided for her ideas about the social importance of women's domestic work and their labor as teachers" (ANB).This copy bears the ownership signature of Josephine Bradstreet (1859-1920), likely the American artist known for her still-life paintings, on the first binder's blank and the title page.

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