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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Barbara A. White. The Beecher Sisters. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 399. $35.00.
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| The three wives of New England Calvinist evangelist Lyman Beecher (1775–1863) bore thirteen children. Of the four daughters surviving to adulthood, Barbara A. White offers an important and densely researched analysis of three who made "pathbreaking careers," despite paternal devaluation of them as mere females barred both from the ministry and from public speaking. Catharine Beecher (1800–1878), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), and Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822–1907) anchor White's study, as advocate pioneer for women's education, antislavery writer, and woman suffragist organizer and orator, respectively. White compellingly illuminates their decisive contributions to generating some of the Beecher family's fame and controversy: Catharine, as an unmarried writer and educator, Harriet, as a minister's wife and mother of seven, and Isabella, a lawyer's wife and mother of four. Moreover, their sometimes imperious interferences in relatives and friends' lives led to tempestuous relations and volatile dealings within the family as well as beyond it. |
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Unquestionably, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), selling more copies in Britain than in the United States, made Harriet the most famous Beecher sister. Yet Catharine's vigorous sectarian and sexual politics treatises also garnered her national attention. Meanwhile, Isabella's complicated and religiously inflected feminist suffragism, her relationships with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and, more controversially, Victoria Woodhull, unleashed a more ambiguous notoriety. |
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