Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education.
Catharine Beecher on Education
Inscribed by Harriet Beecher Stowe, age 18
[Education] Beecher, Catharine E. Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education. Presented to the Trustees of the Hartford Female Seminary, and Published at Their Request. Hartford, [Conn.]: Packard & Butler, 1829.
8vo.; original cloth-backed printed boards.
First edition. Shoemaker 37743. Catharine Beecher was Principal of the Hartford Female Seminary when in 1829, and “was already thinking of giving up her responsibilities in the school.” This volume opens “with the blunt charge that educational standards were low because anyone could become a teacher, teachers were poorly paid, and teaching was considered ‘a drudgery suited only to inferior minds’” (Rugoff, The Beechers, 57 (1981)).
It’s possible Catharine would feel the same about publishing: her name is misspelled on the cover as well as in the Catalogue of the Officers, Teachers, and Pupils for 1829.
A remarkable survival: Harriet Beecher, then 18 years old, was teaching at the Seminary. She inscribed this copy lightly in pencil on the front endpaper: Miss Mary Ann Giles, from her friend, H. Beecher, Boston, March 20, 1830.
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