Why Have We Never Heard of Catharine Beecher? with R. Lee Wilson

She taught, she founded schools, she was published widely, she demonstrated that women and girls could achieve academically at the same levels as men and boys. She became one of the most famous women of her time in the 19th century. Yet, almost none of us have ever heard of Catharine Beecher (even those who know of her famous younger sister). In this episode biographer R. Lee Wilson shares the story of one of the most influential educators that you have never heard of and why he believes you should know how Catharine Beecher changed American education for the better.

Transcript

Scott Lee: Greetings friends and colleagues, welcome to The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast, the professional educator’s thought partner-a service of Oncourse Education Solutions. I am Scott Lee. If you would like to learn more about how we partner with schools and education organizations please visit our website at www.oncoursesolutions.net and reach out. 

Like all professions teaching is shaped by history, so sometimes it is a good idea to learn more about the history of our profession to help us understand how we work with students. So, for this episode I am sharing a conversation with R. Lee Wilson author of Women’s Crusader: Catharine Beecher’s Untold Story. After retiring from a career in financial services, Lee began a second act researching history. After learning the story of Catharine Beecher, who was one of the most famous women and education advocates of the 19th century, he began researching her life and he wrote a new biography of her. As educators, many of us have heard of her contemporary, Horrace Mann, but Catharine Beecher is a name lost to most of us. But as we discuss, educators will certainly recognize her influence on modern education. We will learn about her career later in the episode, but our conversation starts with how Lee became interested in Catharine Beecher’s story.

Welcome Lee to the Thoughtful Teacher Podcast. 

Lee Wilson: Thanks, Scott. It's a pleasure to be with you. 

Scott Lee: So first off you spent most of your career in finance, so why start writing history in the first place?

Lee Wilson: That's a good question. I've always loved history and just like in business, I want to understand not just what happened, but more importantly why it happened. The best historians, I always say, are the best detectives. The success in my business career was enhanced by two important skills, storytelling and original research.

And now that I'm retired, writing history is simply the natural extension of those skills to my passion for. I took lots of history classes in college, and most of what I read outside of work is biography and history. And I have to tell you; I have read a lot of boring dry history books.

Okay. Fortunately, in and amongst that, I've discovered hundreds of interesting stories, that are worthwhile. The book that I wrote is written as an interesting slice of life. It's not a comprehensive biography of Catharine Beecher. The question it seeks to answer is, why did a lighthearted romantic like Catharine Beecher become a serious advocate for women's education?

And the primary focus of the book is on the formative eight years of her life between 1815 and 1823. My objective was to create a memorable story to bring history to life. And I think what what's interesting is, is a narrative that shows how the protagonist struggles with adversity and grows and Beecher's relationship with her family and friends, really enriched the sense of her journey.

And in my business career I, I oftentimes tended to not focus on things like psychology and organizational behavior 'cause I thought there were soft courses. 

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: Now, when people ask me, what was the most important course you took in business school, I say psychology what I learned in business taught me great insights as to people's character and why they do things and their motivations.

And that in life is so much more important than all that other book learning. 

Scott Lee: Right. So, you became interested in Catharine Beecher by accident, or how did you find out about, or it was accidentally on purpose? 

Lee Wilson: It was accidentally on purpose back in 2002. I actually retired from the business world early and I considered getting a PhD in history. Okay. 

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: Because I loved it so much. In the end, I decided against it. Went back to work. But I took a course on the history of women in America from a wonderful professor, Elizabeth Blackmore at Columbia in New York City. Okay? Mm-hmm. And in it, she went through all the various leaders in the movements in American History for women and then stuff like that. And I was fascinated by this Catharine Beecher. Her friends and family all called her Kate. So, if I switch to Kate, please, excuse me, but, but she always used her formal name, Catharine, in her work. But but Catharine Beecher was a pioneer advocate for women's education. She was a bestselling author in the 1840s.

She was probably one of the most famous women in America. She opened up educational opportunities for women. And the fact that she is almost universally forgotten today, I think is almost criminal. When I first learned about her, I would go to dinner and I'd start talking about Catharine Beecher, and everybody would have a blank look on their face and I'd say, “oh, she was Harriet Beecher Stowe's older sister.” 

Oh, they all, they all know Harriet Becher Stowe but they didn't know Catharine, who was, was probably very, very influential in, in Harriet's life. But I found the turning story, turning point story of Catharine Beecher to be compelling. It really reads more like a novel than a dry history book. It's the untold story of romance and grief. That launched her on a new career. Kate and her fiancé, Alexander Fisher, were an unlikely couple. She was a fun-loving extrovert while he was an introverted math prodigy and a brilliant Yale professor, but they were brought together by a piece of her published poetry and their joint love of music.

After a tragic shipwreck tore them apart, Kate's life dramatically shifted focus, and she waged a battle against misogyny to provide women the education that they deserved. But lastly, I found Catharine Beecher to be a fascinating person because she was full of contradictions. Okay? If, if a person is just, everything is the same and seems to go right along the flow, that's fine. That's not what real people are like. Most of us have flaws, have problems or whatever. So, Catharine Beecher loved to learn and she became a famous educator. But you know what? She hated the job of teaching.

She loved proselytizing for education, but actually the job of teaching she didn't really love and neither did her father. She wrote about the important role of women running households. In fact, she invented the discipline of home economics. 

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: She wasn't just like part of it. She invented it. Okay. With her book, Treatise on Domestic Economy in 1841, and yet she never married. Okay. Contradiction. 

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: She could be charming and had a nice sense of humor, but she also had a wicked temper; I like to think of her as a stick of dynamite with a short fuse. Okay. She, she was an interesting character and one of my favorite Catharine Beecher stories, if I can digress here.

Scott Lee: Sure. 

Lee Wilson: It illustrates her, her sort of like her charming and witty personality was later in life. She wanted to take a course at Cornell University. And women were, were barely allowed to attend college in the 1870s, okay? 

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: Really wasn't until after the, the Civil War that they were, but she asked permission from its president, Dr. Andrew White, to take a course, and he patronizingly explained that the courses of the school were not open to women. And without missing a beat, she says, “oh, that's quite all right. I prefer to take classes with men.” He, he didn't know what to say. He was like totally put off and, and he, he finally relented and he asked her if he could help her find lodging in the town while she was taking the course. And she told him she would stay in the dorm. He said, “That's a dormitory for young men.” And Beecher said she'd already inspected the dorm and found it quite satisfactory. And as for those young men, they will not trouble me in the least. She went on to take the course and she was one of the most popular students living in that dormitory.

So, she, she could be a fighter, she could be feisty. But she could also be charming. And I find those two different aspects of her personality to be interesting. And she was also a powerful advocate for women. I mean, she had led a selfless crusade her whole life for women. Okay. And yet she opposed suffrage for most of her career, but eventually embraced it. 

Scott Lee: That was one thing I wanted to make sure and ask about. When you mentioned contradiction, I mean here she was in the 1820s, encouraging others to lobby Congress against Andrew Jackson's removal bill. Right. Focused on the Cherokee, Choctaw Chickasaw, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole, nations. And here she is encouraging everybody she knows to write their congressman buttonhole, their congressman and senators, however they could. And of course, at a time when media was all paper, and yet she was opposed to the right to vote [for women] even though she's encouraging advocacy. So, could you share a little bit more about that contradiction in particular? 'Cause I just as a, as a history teacher, I found that interesting.

Lee Wilson: It, it is one of the most difficult things to understand. You need to have a context and understand the context of the times to really appreciate that, but you're absolutely correct. She felt it was the moral duty of American women to oppose. Jackson's removal of the Native Americans, okay?

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: And she led a successful petition drive Chief Justice Marshall ruled in their favor. Andrew Jackson did it anyway. What I admire most about Catharine Beecher was her selfless crusade to improve the lives of women, American women in the face of fierce opposition, from what I would describe a misogynist male establishment.

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: Okay. And yet, for most of her life, she curiously, as you point out, opposed female suffrage. Part of this was due to her view that education and healthcare. More immediate, priorities for women at the time. One of the most frequent comments I get from young women readers is, “I, I'm so glad I didn't live back then.”

Okay. Beecher developed a philosophy that accepted the existing gender hierarchy at the time, not because it was just, but in order to focus for immediate benefits for women. Let me give you a few examples of why she believed that education and healthcare are more important. Before I come back to answer your question specifically about suffrage, you know, the world where Catharine Beecher grew up provided women with only a rudimentary education.

They weren't allowed to take subjects like science or mathematics, nor were they allowed to attend college. Most women were prepared by their parents strictly for matrimony. This was a huge loss because the educated people are the source of all progress in our country, and half of the population wasn't educated.

I believe that Catharine Beecher's crusade to educate that half of the population is sufficient to qualify her for an important place in American history. Women's health was a whole different topic that again, people can't appreciate. Catharine Beecher estimated that half the women at the time had curvature of the spine 'cause they sat doing needle work and tasks like that. She has a picture in a book of this woman with, with bad posture in her spine or whatever. The statistics about pregnancy and childbearing are frightful. When I share these with at book talks, people can't believe it. There's very little information about family planning back in 1820.

Okay. The female fertility rate at the time was seven, meaning that the average woman, not the, the, the far end of the spectrum, but the average woman had seven children during her lifetime. That's like almost unimaginable today. Now, the maternal mortality rate has been estimated to have been almost 3%, meaning that every time a woman gave birth, she faced almost a 3% chance of death.

And a lot of women did die in child childbirth. Okay? That compares to today. It's two 100th of a percent chance of death. In pregnancy. It was 145 times higher. And lastly, the child mortality rate for children under the age of five was 40%, meaning that of those seven children, a woman bore, only four of them would grow to be adults.

If you imagine the heartbreak, so Catharine Beecher was trying to educate women. She was trying to teach them about health and nutrition and things like that. And those were critical, important issues that she felt she could do something about right then. Now people today tend to think that progress for women began with Susan B. Anthony and Cady Stanton. You know Right. I mentioned, I mentioned Catharine Beecher and some of her contemporaries. Nobody knows them, but they all know Susan B. Anthony. Okay. But their contributions were monumental and Catharine Beecher was not alone in this; there are people like Emma Hart Willard who started Troy Female Seminary, Zilpah Grant Banister at Ipswich Female Seminary, Mary Lyon, who founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which became Mount Holyoke College.

These women together with Catharine Beecher, between 1820 and 1870 created an educated group of women who became the foot soldiers, the warriors for suffrage. Okay. It's educated people who become the agitators for progress and change. Okay. While Beecher was a strong advocate for women, she believed that suffrage, that women voting back in that day first wouldn't happen during her lifetime. And it didn't, suffrage didn't actually happen until 1920. 

Scott Lee: Okay. Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: Almost 50 years after she died. But if you think about politics today and you think about how like dirty it is or whatever it was every bit as bad back in the 1840s. Okay. And Catharine Beecher believed that women had a unique role and opportunity to provide moral education, which she felt.

Women were better at than men. In fact, she didn't think that women were equal. She thought they were better than men. And she thought that there was a, an opportunity for women to provide that moral education that would create a better American democracy. And if they delved into the street fighting of politics, they would forfeit that privileged position to be able to do that.

So anyway, this is one of the things I disagree with, Katherine Beecher on, I, she opposed suffrage. In, in a very vocal way, okay? And for, for a large chunk of her career. And in retrospect, I think it was a big mistake. Okay. You fight the people who are against you, not the people who are on your side, you know, and she wrote these treatises talking about how we share principles, but we're, we're working on different, tactics or whatever. In the 1870s, she gave a speech where she actually embraced suffrage and felt that women had the right and in fact the duty to agitate for the right to vote. But for a big chunk of her career, she, she fought men, and frankly, I think she would've been better off to let them do their thing, to do her thing and fight the men who are opposing women's education. 

Scott Lee: And it is interesting, just as an aside note, what you pointed out is that, we really don't understand. In modern politics, people talk about, oh, our polarized politics, but how violent, elections were, in the 1840s and 1850s and 

Lee Wilson: Oh, yes. 

Scott Lee: And, and that was one of the arguments that many men made: women should not be allowed to vote because every time you would go to a polling place there was fighting in the streets and it's too dangerous for women was the, was the argument at the time. 

Lee Wilson: And well, there, there were also arguments that women weren't educated, so therefore they should be allowed though, right? Right. So it's a chicken or the egg. Yeah, so, so Catharine Beecher and, and Mary Lyon and all those other women, they were focused on getting women educated and that took away that whole argument that women aren't educated enough to vote.

Scott Lee: Yeah. So, another interesting thing, , that, you mentioned and, and that we were discussing before we started recording, , was the issue of bullying, , that she had experienced, and how that affected, her. Could you share a little bit about the issue around, , bullying that we were talking about earlier?

Sure.

Lee Wilson: Catharine Beecher was engaged to this brainiac professor Alexander Fisher. And he died in a tragic shipwreck, and I won't go into all the details about it, but the congregational church at that time believed if you hadn't had a conversion experience that you were certainly gonna go to hell. Now, her fiance had not had a conversion experience.

That was a well-known fact. Okay, so the first thing that her father did, he wrote her a letter [00:17:00] telling her , that Alexander had died. Okay? Why he didn't come and tell her in person is beyond me, but he wrote her a letter and immediately said, and now what happens about your soul? Okay, you need to seek conversion or you will go to hell.

Rather than comfort her, he immediately launched into trying to save her soul, and he badgered her and he bullied her about she needed to do this and that about conversion when they had a, a memorial service for Alexander Fisher at Yale University. 

Scott Lee: They didn't. And he, he was a professor at Yale at the time also.

Correct? 

Lee Wilson: He was a professor at Yale University. One of-you won't, you won't believe this-one of eight. There were only 300 students. It was a very different place. But one of his mentors gave a eulogy that was published and was very well known, and he didn't bother to mention Catharine Beecher. Didn't mention that he was engaged. Didn't mention her. She was devastated. And this same gentleman when they divvied up Alexander's personal papers, took all of his personal letters, and her father took Alexander Fisher's personal diaries-his religious diaries. Okay. When his father came to sign the papers to settle the estate, they didn't tell him. Okay? It was only by chance that Catharine Beecher discovered that this enemy of hers who hadn't mentioned her in his, in his eulogy, had the personal letters. The first thing that must have gone through her mind was, “I wonder if one of my letters was amongst those letters that he had.”

Imagine, Alexander's family decided to create a monument. And Catharine Beecher was a poet, and they asked her to write a poem for the monument. Okay. And, Yale was going to provide an epitaph for the back of the monument. Okay. And Catharine Beecher's poetry was sort of circulated and the Yale establishment criticized it.

They didn't feel it was appropriate for a woman's sentiment to be on a monument because would mar the dignity of the monument. Okay. She was devastated. So, she was bullied by her father and her brother about conversion. She was bullied by the establishment about this and she eventually sought refuge with Alexander's family where she found some comfort, during her bereavement.

During her whole career, she continued to fight a male establishment, but it was that formative experience. Early on while she was in her bereavement, that fundamentally, I don't wanna say that she became an enemy of men, but she be… she realized that men were not going to do anything to help women get educated.

They weren't gonna help. Right? And she decided if we're gonna do something about women's education, it's gonna have to be women. Who were gonna have to do it. The men fought her. She tried to raise an endowment for her, for her school that she founded. They fought her on that. They didn't wanna like endow a woman's school.

In fact, what they did was they raised money to found Trinity University in Hartford, Connecticut for men, right? So, she was bullied and badged her whole life, and some people react differently. She had a strong backbone. She had a lot of intelligence, and what it did was it, it stiffened her resolve to fight for women's education.

And it is in that context and, and a lifetime dedicated to education that I think we have to come to admire her. There are some things that are not admirable about her, like fighting suffrage or whatever, but that's a tactical sort of like issue that eventually got resolved.

But this fight for women's education, she felt was fundamental to everything, every fiber in her being. 

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. And so, she started her own school. 

Lee Wilson: She did in 1823. She founded Hartford Female Seminary. I think she had like eight students at the time. And her sister and she were the two teachers, and they did it on the third floor above a harness shop. And fortunately there were a number of well to do, people in, in Hartford, Connecticut who sent their daughters to her. Within five years, she'd figured out the system and she raised money and built a new school. That could house 120 students. She was fighting against men for, for helping women.

She put one of the, like the wealthiest men on town, had him help design the facade of the building. Guess what? He gave a whole bunch of money. Okay. So, she was a pragmatist. She figured out the system and she knew that the Beecher name was big name. And she leveraged that women were not allowed to be religious leaders, okay? And she had not herself been converted, but she led a revival at her school. Where all kinds of young women were, brought to religion, right? Her father didn't approve the local minister. When she asked for help, he thought it was all a joke, and he left it to the side and didn't do anything about it.

She, in, in the end, brought all kinds of women to religion and it wasn't anything she was supposed to do, but she realized that religion, because her father was a famous nationally known preacher. Could be leveraged. And eventually she shifted her fight from religion to morality. Okay. And she felt that morality was something that would go across different denominations.

If she had wanted to raise money for a school, if she had said, we're just gonna be a congregational church and we won't let the Baptist in, we won't let the Episcopalians in or what, she could have raised the money. Okay, because that was the way it was done. But she focused on morality and as a result, had quite an interesting career late in life. She came back to religion, but, but that's a whole different story. 

Scott Lee: So, the focus of her school was a little bit different than the standard curriculum of the time. It's hard to make the distinction between high school and college at that period. But what was the focus compared to other schools as far as the classical education? Greek. Latin. Yeah. Those kinds of things. 

Lee Wilson: Okay. So, so women were basically taught in the schools that they attended. And there were some, some well-known women schools and there were lots of women who ran schools outta their homes or whatever.

And what they taught was reading, writing. arithmetic, you know, the basics. Okay. But the higher branches of, of learning such as rhetoric, Latin, mathematics, physics, all those things, they were reserved men. Women were not taught those things. So, what Catharine Beecher sought to do was to take the, the educational system that men had and bring it to women. 'cause she thought that women could learn those subjects just as well as men. And she was living actually with her brother Edward at the time in Hartford. And she was teaching Latin to these women. Okay? And what she would do was she would, like at night, she would learn a, a lesson on Latin from her brother Edward and the next day she would teach it at school, her ladies. Okay? So, she taught what they call the higher branches of education to women. And she did one other thing that, that was very different. She felt that physical education was critically important to women and there was no idea that women needed physical education, right?

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: Calisthenics, all those kinds of things started to be brought to the classroom. She believed that women exercised better to music. So, she would play the piano and they would exercise to the music 'cause the rhythm, you know.

Scott Lee: Right. 

Lee Wilson: She should have gotten a patent on that idea. You know, I mean like all the money that's been made in the last 20, 25 years over, over exercise and music Catharine Beecher was doing this in the 1820s. She was way, way ahead of her time anyway, so it's fascinating. She was focused on that stuff later on in her career. In the 1840s, she wrote her, her seminal book, Treatise on Domestic Economy. Okay. And it was a how-to advice book about how to run a household. It brought all the latest science on nutrition and homemaking and stuff like that. She was trying to professionalize the role of a woman. That's where she in fact, invented the, the, the academic discipline of ho home economics at the time. 

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: Sometimes if you do a Wikipedia search or whatever, you'll find there's a woman in the 1890s who founded the first home economics association, but it all really goes back to Catharine Beecher's book, where she brought science to the world of women. 

Scott Lee: Uhhuh. 

Lee Wilson: When that happened, they started to teach that, but that was probably 20 years after her, her school in Hartford. 

Scott Lee: So, home economics was after she had left that school?

Lee Wilson: Absolutely. She ran that school for a decade. Okay. And what she found was that it was incredibly hard. I mean, she came to appreciate how hard it is to be a, a good teacher. Okay. You're invested in your students and, and it's very, very hard work. And she's trying to do that.

At the same time, she was trying to be the administrator, right? There was no formal administrator, so she was the administrator and the teacher, and she was trying to raise money for the school and for everything. It was like too much. So, she, she quit that and she wrote a couple books about educational philosophy. And then she followed her father to Cincinnati because he was apointed head of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. She went to Cincinnati and she discovered a couple aunts and a couple uncles from her mother's family. And she founded a new school there called the Western Female Institute. And she cajoled one of her favorite students, Mary Dutton, to come out and help along with some others to be teachers. And in that school, she became an administrator. But Catharine really wanted to focus the world's attention on women's education. And her big vision was that.

With all the population growth in Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, that they estimated that there, there was a need for 90,000 teachers in the Midwest, okay?

Scott Lee: Mm-hmm. 

Lee Wilson: And so, she positioned herself as the bridge who understood the, the needs of the Midwest and the West. They called it the West, right. And, and the resources of the East coast. And she went out and she founded an organization to start to bring teachers to the Midwest. And it was the start of her role as a, as an education advocate, which is what she did for the bulk of her career. She founded a couple other small schools that didn't work out. One of them was in my hometown of Quincy, Illinois., She eventually founded the Milwaukee Normal Institute. Which we'd consider today more like a high school. Okay. 

Scott Lee: Right. 

Lee Wilson: But Milwaukee Normal Institute, then became Milwaukee College for Women. It merged with Downer and became Milwaukee Downer College, and ultimately it was absorbed by Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Which today still claims the heritage of Milwaukee Downer. So, in that way, Catharine Beecher does have an institutional legacy, not one that anybody knows about, but she does have it.

Scott Lee: And just for historical context, the idea of the normal school, which still, would not really qualify as a modern college, but it was both that at that level. 

Lee Wilson: Yeah, 

Scott Lee: those, those are the first training. True teacher training schools. So, we know and we know about, Horace Mann's advocacy of normal schools.

Lee Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. 

Scott Lee: And while it was still by our standards, definitely still sort of a high school type program at a time when, most schools only went through either the sixth or the eighth grade. That was all the education you really needed. But she was an advocate in parallel to somebody that many of us in the education world know better: Horace Mann. Advocating for the normal school for stronger education for teachers, is there a connection between Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher? 

Lee Wilson: Absolutely. It, it, it's sort of like a little bit of a coincidence early on in terms of that connection. Horace Mann was from Franklin, Massachusetts. He's probably their most celebrated resident. And he went and he visited Litchfield, Connecticut. Right. And at that time, he ran into Katherine Beecher. Who he had a nice conversation with [he] said,  “she's very good in poetry” that “she's very intelligent.” She reads Scott's novels and things like that and felt that that Catharine Beecher would make a great helpmate to Alexander Fisher who was her fiance at the time.

Okay, so for Mann, met Catharine Beecher back then, but in 1846. When she was an education advocate she was creating an organization to bring teachers from the East coast to the Midwest where they were needed. Right? And she realized that in that world, to raise money, she needed a male figurehead as the president. So, she installed her brother-in-law, Calvin Stowe, who was Harriet Beecher Stowe's. Husband and her brother-in-law in that role. But eventually, as she, she ramped it up, she needed to find a, better person to do that. Horace Mann was instrumental in helping Catharine Beecher recruit Governor William Slade from Vermont to be that head of the organization and Catharine Beecher was going to stay out east raise money, find teachers and send them them to the Midwest. And Governor Slade was gonna be in Cincinnati and he was gonna find places to place the teachers and things like that. It was a big help to find that person, but it didn't work out so well for Catharine Becher. Okay. Because Governor Slade, when he got there, realized that probably Catharine had overstated, oversold a little bit, the, the ability to place teachers in the Midwest and he took over the organization.

She was so upset here. She created this organization, worked on it for years, and he took it over. So, she created her own organization, and continued to send women to the west. 

Scott Lee: So, what do you see as Catharine Beecher's legacy to, our world today? And understanding not just education, but any issue that, that you think is important? 

Lee Wilson: I think there, there are a couple that that really come to mind. Uh, I've mentioned institutional legacy, but I think that the idea that women should learn all academic subjects at all levels was like a critical breakthrough.

I mean, it seems like logical in our day and age. Back then, it was not a mainstream thought. The idea that women should even study some of those topics like science and physics. What would they do with something like that? Okay. So, I think that that was a breakthrough, insight that she championed for, for 50 years.

And I think that that is a lasting legacy of her work because it is, it totally changed the world. Totally changed the way the American Republic worked. I think that her enduring legacy is really her students. Okay. We all know her most famous student was her sister, Harriet Becher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin and all this kind of stuff. But you probably are not familiar with some of the, the women who came out her school. Fannie Fern. Okay. Fannie Fern, who Catharine Beecher described as one of her worst behaved students, but the one she loved the best. She was smart and Fannie Fern went on to become the bestselling author, and by 1855 was the highest paid columnist in America, male or female. She was the highest paid columnist which means that people were voting with their, their wallets, to listen to what she had to say. 

Sarah Walker Davis was also a student who became an advisor to her husband, David Davis, who you may know was Abraham Lincoln's campaign manager. Later he was appointed by Lincoln as a Supreme Court Justice. Sarah Walker Davis and her husband were close friends of Abraham Lincoln, who frequently discussed issues with them in their home. She was like an insider. Insider in in Abraham Lincoln's world. 

And lastly, I'll mention Virginia Thrall Smith who became a pioneer advocate for women. She was devoted to helping the poor in 1881, and she established the first free kindergarten in Hartford in 1892. She established the Connecticut Children's Aid Society. 

So, you can talk about legacies, but maybe Catharine Beecher had, like in her school over its 50 years, a thousand students. Most of 'em went on to become teachers or social advocates. They had children, they influenced people. The impact of Katherine Beecher on American discourse is immeasurable. And I just highlight those people to like make it real because I could say it's, it's like they're all these famous people, but to listen to what they did is, is really quite impressive.

Scott Lee: Well, where can folks find out more and, about you and about Catharine Beecher and purchase the book? 

Lee Wilson: First of all, they can, they can visit my website. Which is www r lee wilson.com. And in on there you can read more about my research because I spent like years reading old manuscripts and letters and diaries. And there's some videos where I talk about the book. You can read the reviews on Good Reads or Amazon. You can buy it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.com or bookshop.org or if you want, if you ask your local bookstore, they can order the book for you.

My book has, has won some nice awards. I think everybody who's read it has really enjoyed it, and I just hope that people will read it and take away that Catharine Beecher was somebody who deserves a place in American history. 

Scott Lee: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Lee. We appreciate, your work and finding out more about somebody who is forgotten in our profession of teaching. 

Lee Wilson: Well, it's been a pleasure to talk to you, Scott.

Scott Lee: The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast is brought to you as a service of Oncourse Education Solutions. If you would like to learn more about how we partner with schools and youth organizations strengthening learning cultures and developing more resilient youth, please visit our website at w w w dot oncoursesolutions dot net. Also, please follow me on social media, my handle on Instagram and Bluesky is @drrscottlee and on Mastodon @drrscottlee@universedon.com

This has been episode 9 of the 2025 season. If you enjoy this podcast, please tell your friends and colleagues about us, in person and on social media. Also, five-star reviews on your podcast app helps others find us. The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast is a production of Oncourse Education Solutions LLC, Scott Lee producer. Guest was not compensated for appearance, nor did guest pay to appear. Episode notes, links and transcripts are available at our website w w w dot thoughtfulteacherpodcast dot com. Theme music is composed and performed by Audio Coffee.