Isabel Garghill Beecher andthe Shifting Narrative of “True Womanhood”

Angela SmithWomen’s History Seminar

Dr. Leone12/11/07

Isabel Garghill Beecher and the Shifting Narrative of “True Womanhood”

The separate spheres for men and women began to overlap ever so slightly as the

Industrial Revolution came to America in the early nineteenth century; by mid-century,

the boundaries were clearly beginning to shift. The cultural turbulence of the Civil War

and its aftermath propelled a continuing transition in the role of women, and doors

opened for women to step into traditionally male roles. It was, in fact, a woman – Harriet

Beecher Stowe – who came to worldwide notoriety with the publication of her anti-

slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1851. The mother of seven traveled across the

United States and to Europe to deliver passionate speeches calling for the abolition of

slavery. Her sisters, Catharine and Isabella, also operated outside the domestic sphere.

Catharine advocated women’s education and wrote advice books, and Isabella worked for

women’s rights. They were one family and their brothers had fame (and infamy) too, but

they were on the cusp of a defining moment in the roles of women and, as a result, the

roles of men as well. Around the country, the cult of “True Womanhood,” in which

women were purveyors of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity, had begun to

unravel.1 In the eyes of many, it was risky business, as Mrs. S.L. Dagg wrote on behalf of

the Young Ladies Missionary Association of the Philadelphia Collegiate Institution. She

pointed out that “no sensible woman will suffer her intellectual pursuits to clash with her

domestic duties.”2 The underpinning of that thought, of course, was that the true woman

1 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966), 151-174.

2 Ibid., 153.

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stayed in the domestic sphere where she also stayed close to God and her children.

Otherwise, she would surely suffer the fate of a woman like Margaret Fuller, whose

intellect was powerful enough to embolden women to think; yet, by its same power, it

also allowed them to drift from the path to salvation.3

Just as the Beecher women had ignored such warnings when they were issued in the

mid-nineteenth century, so did Isabel Garghill Beecher two generations later,

exemplifying in a new century the ongoing shift in women’s roles. She was a first-

generation Irish-American woman, a graduate of Northwestern University School of

Oratory, and an accomplished actress and orator who married steel executive Leonard

Thurlow Beecher, great-nephew of writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. Before Isabel became a

wife in 1898 and mother in 1904, “she was already a luminary of the Lyceum and

Chautauqua circuits.”4 Her new family did not change her work schedule; she continued

to perform, and her job took her away from home, away from her husband, away from

their young son, and away from what some saw as her obligations as a wealthy resident

of an upscale neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama.

3 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966), 154; and David M. Robinson, “Margaret Fuller and the Transcendental Ethos: Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” PMLA, Vol. 97, No. 1. (Jan., 1982), pp. 83-98; Fuller was a member of the nineteenth century New England transcendentalists. Besides being an early advocate for women’s rights, she was a philosopher, academic, writer, and editor of The Dial Magazine. She published a long essay titled, “Women in the Nineteenth Century,” in which she commented on the status of women in America, and pleaded for their liberation. She also became pregnant while living and writing in Italy, and later married the father of her son. According to Welter’s magazine research, Fuller was seen as an example of what can happen when women stray from the true calling of womanhood.

4 John N. Beecher, “The Vital I: An Autobiography, 1904-1926,” unpublished autobiography, Burnsville, NC, 1960, Barbara Beecher, 10.

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The Beechers moved to Birmingham from New York in 1908 after U.S. Steel bought

out Tennessee Coal and Iron (TCI). Northern bankers purchased TCI in 1900. Don

Bacon, the new CEO of the company, offered Beecher the position of treasurer of the

company in 1901. Though TCI had never been a particularly profitable public company,

it became the only producer of a new kind of stronger steel in the early 1900s that

railroad companies began purchasing exclusively. This made the company attractive to

J.P. Morgan and U.S. Steel. TCI became a pawn in a battle Morgan and John W. Gates

during a particularly volatile period in the stock market. Though Gates stepped in and

became majority stockholder in 1906, this was temporary. By fall 1907, the bottom had

dropped out of the market and the heavily leveraged TCI was sold to U.S. Steel for a

fraction of its former value. Beecher survived the sale of the company, but was soon

relocated to Birmingham to continue his role as treasurer in the southern subsidiary of

U.S. Steel.5 John notes in his autobiography that his father felt lucky to have carried on

through the sale of TCI and come out of it with a job.6

These were the stressful circumstances of Isabel Beecher’s life in the early years of

the twentieth century, and reflected the ongoing shift of women’s roles. Not only was

Isabel a mother, she also had a very public role in the traveling Chautaquas. In Isabel’s

family, her work shifted the division of labor in the home, but in terms of parenting, that

was not a bad thing, according to her son, John Beecher, who became a poet, a civil

rights activist and a father of four. In the first chapter of his unpublished autobiography,

5 1. Justin Fuller, History of Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, 1852-1907 (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1966), 135-167.

6 Beecher notes in his autobiography, “Suddenly flung out of New York and our airy suburban mansion in upper Montclair by the panic, lucky to have a job at all in his newly Morganized company, my father had rented the best house available.” Beecher, “The Vital I,” 5.

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he speaks of his father spending “all his spare time with me.” He also notes, “A letter

from my mother to my father on one of her tours is dated on my fourth birthday, January

22, 1908. It is on the stationery of the Hotel Hupp in the hamlet of Pratt, Kansas. ‘Bless

you for doing so much to mother him. What a fortunate child he is!’”7 The Beechers saw

no sign that a woman’s choice could cause society to “break up and become a chaos of

disjointed and unsightly elements,” as the cult of true womanhood predicted. 8 Rather,

their family remained loving and strong even as Isabel fulfilled a greater destiny than that

of a “chosen vessel.”

Until the dawn of the twentieth century, women were expected to live and work

primarily – often solely –in the domestic sphere. This division of labor and roles between

women and men shaped this setting, and encouraged mothers to raise pious and pure

children as model citizens. As women ventured into the public sphere, however, they

became focused on their external roles, and men were sometimes drawn into the domestic

sphere. This construct of separate spheres helps historians distinguish the gender roles in

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is also evident, however, that “separate spheres”

supports a capitalist idea that continues today. Women, the idea suggests, do not work,

they help; they function in outside jobs, but their place is at home, nurtured by the love of

their families rather than rewarded for contributions that are equal to those of men.9 With

shifts in the economy during the Industrial Revolution and around the turn of the century,

the income provided by a working woman may have been important, but was

downplayed; the two-income household so prevalent in the late twentieth century existed, 7 Ibid., 6.

8 Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 173.

9 Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” The Journal of American History 75 (June 1988), 27.

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but the woman’s income, psychologically if not literally, superfluous rather than

essential. In the Beecher family, luck not only left Leonard with a job after the TCI

buyout, but it left Isabel with an opportunity to earn money on the Chautauqua circuit.

She had been established on the circuit before her marriage in 1898 and continued

through the national economic crises of 1903 and 1907. “I don’t believe her money was

responsible for the family’s survival,” John Beecher’s widow, Barbara, recalled in 2007.

“It certainly may have helped in this period, but at that time no one would have

acknowledged that, certainly she would not, because her husband was an executive. She

would not outshine him.”10

Isabel Beecher was one of many women who took advantage of the increasing public

spaces open to women in the late nineteenth century. When the traveling Lyceum arrived

from England in the early 1800s, derived from England’s “mechanics’ institutes,”11 it

provided lectures by men and for men. Over the course of a century, however, it became

a broader cultural tradition that brought women on as lecturers and performers as well as

audience members, as did the Chatauqua movement that arose in the 1870s. Those

changes, however, came about with the influence of the changing spheres of men and

women in the culture.

Leaders of the Chautaqua Movement, although they came to the movement in

different places and with different philosophies, were influential in its evolution. John

Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller were Methodists and are widely considered the co-

founders of the Chautauqua Assemblies in the 1870s. In the first years, the liberalism and

10 Barbara Beecher, interview, phone, 9 December 2007.

11 Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 7.

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diversity that later marked the movement were not evident. Vincent, born in Alabama

and raised in Pennsylvania, saw the Chautauqua effort as one that would join the camp

meeting and the Sunday school, but it could succeed only with a coordinated effort to

neutralize the “infidels and God-less Germans, as well as Catholic Irish.”12 He opposed

woman suffrage and viewed slaves as contented domestic helpers, and “his Chautauqua

system of education standardized, rationalized, and otherwise imposed expert (male)

authority over home-based pedagogies once left to untrained novices (women).13 Miller

was a wealthy industrialist and a Sunday school superintendent in Ohio. He was less

concerned with Sunday school’s role in preserving moral order than with bringing the

gatherings out of dingy church basements and into the Chautauqua halls with rotundas

that allowed speakers to reach all groups – this was the Akron Plan in the late 1860s.14

Despite the differences between the two, Vincent’s “idea man” was the complement to

Miller’s “nuts and bolts manager” and they, like Chautauqua itself, straddled the

“dichotomies – in particular, idealist/pragmatist, religion/market, and sacred/secular.”15

Because both believed Sunday school was important and deserving of good teachers,

Vincent suggested that they set up a protracted normal institute and house it in the

building in Akron fashioned after Miller’s ideas. Miller agreed with the institute, but

suggested they examine a camp meeting site in western New York. It was there on the

12 Andrew Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 98.

13 Ibid., 97.

14 Ibid., 91.

15 Ibid., 93.

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shore of Chautauqua Lake that the first Chautauqua Assembly opened for a two-week

session in August 1874.16

From those beginnings, Chautauquas paved the way for extension courses,

community colleges, adult education centers and dozens of other educational ventures,

including the traveling “big tent” traveling Chautauquas begun in 1904 by Keith Vawter,

former manager of the Chicago Redpath Lyceum Bureau.17 Although the “big tent” was

not technically an arm of the institutional Chautauquas, the traveling programs had a

parallel mission and both grew to include opera, concerts, lectures, entertainment, and

recreation as well as study courses. Vawter began the traveling Chautauquas because he

believed intelligent planning could produce a financially successful venture. Mass

transportation had begun to open up rural areas, so planning became the key to his

success. At first he lost money, but by 1907 he calculated a way to make the enterprise

profitable by partnering with independent Chautauquas. According to Joseph Gould, in

The Chautauqua Movement, “The connotation of wickedness and abandon that rural

American associated with the theatre were not applied to tent Chautauquas. The name

itself was a warrant of respectability, and the reputations of the personalities who

appeared behind the Chautauqua footlights were above reproach.”18

Chautauquas were instrumental in helping open the public sphere to women. In his

book, The Chautauqua Movement, Andrew Reiser argues, “By treating the assembly as

an extension of the typical Victorian parlor, Chautauqua women would make their towns

16 Joseph E. Gould, The Chautauqua Movement, An Episode in the Continuing American Revolution (New York: State University of New York, 1961), 3.

17 Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment, 99.

18 Gould, The Chautauqua Movement, An Episode in the Continuing American Revolution, 79.

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safe in preparation for women’s fuller entrance into civic life.”19 He suggests that the

female participants made an unconscious bargain with the male Chautauquan leaders: in

exchange for women’s continued moral authority within the movement, women would

not challenge the leader’s authority. Thus by recreating the domestic sphere within in the

Chautauqua movement, women began to crack open the spheres. 20

Though the lyceums were initially the province of men, from Mark Twain to Bronson

Alcott to Henry Ward Beecher, eventually, many women gained a spot on the stage and

became integral to the Chautauqua’s mission and soon became main attractions in the

traveling lecture circuit by the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, Isabel Beecher

“became the highest paid and most popular dramatic reader of her time.”21 Harry P.

Harrison, a manager with the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, which operated in Birmingham,

Alabama, and eleven other cities, spoke of her appeal, noting, “”The fact that we

advertised her as a niece of Henry Ward Beecher did not hurt her with the ticket

buyers.”22 She was not only popular, she was also talented, as Charles Wagner noted

when he said she “certainly could have had a great success as a dramatic actress had she

so chosen.”23 Many years after Isabel’s death in 1955, “a very old lady” wrote to John

19 Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment, 197.

20 Ibid., 196-197.

21 Charles Ludwig Wagner, Seeing Stars (Manchester, NH: Ayer Company Publishers, 2006), 33.

22 Harry P. Harrison, Culture Under Canvas: The Story of Tent Chautauqua (New York: Hastings House, Publishers, 1958), 196.

23 Wagner, Seeing Stars, 33.

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Beecher: “I heard your mother read Ibsen’s Ghosts in Cleveland once. . . . In the pauses

you could hear the men’s watches ticking in their pockets.”24

In Isabel’s own mind and with a nod to the traditional women’s sphere, pursuing a

career as an actress was not in the cards. According to Wagner, “Her attitude towards the

theater was the common view of these supermoral times. The stage was looked down

upon; society was knocking, not knocking at, the stage door in that period. She told me:

‘My son John (then two years old) will grow up and I want him to have every advantage.

I feel that he might not be proud of an actress mother.’”25 Her son – an only child –would

not have held that against her, though. When he was a sophomore at Cornell his mother

spent a week with him and charmed his friends. “When she left, John told her: ‘The boys

are all wild about you, Mother. They all know you do something on the stage, but they

don’t quite seem to grasp it. Gee, I wish you were a regular actress.’” She was such a

good sport about it that she quickly revealed it to promoter Charles Wagner, who had

failed in all his efforts to convince her to take up the stage.26

In spite of her absences, it is apparent through John Beecher’s papers that he did not

feel – indeed, that he was not – neglected by his mother although he certainly missed her

presence. Before his death in 1980, he had completed one volume of a planned three-

volume autobiography. He described his mother’s return from reading “Peter Pan” in

Chicago. “She sat down beside me on the porch swing. ‘Hold out your hands!’ she

commanded. ‘I’m going to give you all the money I got for reading Peter Pan to those

children in Chicago. Then will you forgive me?’ . . . What would I do with this sudden

24 Beecher, “The Vital I,” 7.

25 Wagner, Seeing Stars, 34.

26 Ibid.

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fortune? An electric train perhaps? But my mother swept the [five] crinkly twenty-dollar

bills out of my hands and returned them to her purse. ‘This money is going into your

savings account,’ she said.”27 On another occasion, “On St. Patrick’s Day she sent me a

little green stovepipe hat with tiny green candies and a clay bubble-pipe inside. I piously

sucked one of the candies every night because if I rationed myself to a single candy per

nocturn, my father said, mother would be home just as I finished the last one.”

Meanwhile, he would have to get by with his father, the household help, and his writing.

As John Beecher grew older, his mother’s attention and encouragement did not

waver, even though they had their battles, as is the case with every mother and child. The

estrangements never lasted and she would quickly return to her role as champion of her

intelligent and talented son. When John was a teenager in Birmingham and was very

unhappy, he recalled, “In my misery I wrote a long poem about my city. Though modeled

on Sandburg’s ‘Chicago,’ my poem entitled ‘Birmingham’ had a broader diapason. It was

curiously sensuous, pure sound and color, with no note of social protest. My mother

preferred it to my earlier work and made it a part of her repertoire. She read it to Carl

Sandburg when he came to lecture in Birmingham that spring. He said that I wrote better

steel mill poetry than he did. Perhaps. I had worked there while he hadn’t.”28 Indeed John

had, for even though his father was the head of the huge mill, John had insisted on

summer jobs among the men who worked the hardest, hottest, dirtiest jobs at the

furnaces. It was there that his burgeoning social concerns expanded, with the full, if not

always enthusiastic, support of his mother.

27 Beecher, “The Vital I,” 7-8.

28 Beecher, “The Vital I,” 304.

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In a 1979 letter profiling his education, John Beecher includes his mother as one of

his most influential teachers. He writes:

My first teacher was my mother, Isabel Garghill Beecher (1867-1955) who was a quondam member of the faculty at Northwestern University’s School of Oratory, the first college level school of speech in the United States. Before and after marriage to my father in 1898, she was one of the ornaments of the Lyceum and Chautauqua stage and was certainly the greatest Shakespearean reader (“interpreter” was the fancy word) this country has ever known. … She should, and could, have been a tragic actress but this was incompatible with being the wife of a high official of U.S. Steel, my father, Leonard T. Beecher (1867-1959), and the mother of what she called, in Touchstone’s phrase, “an ill-favored thing, but mine own,” namely the aforementioned “universal man” who was in his earliest youth an ugly duckling.29

Isabel Beecher might have been atypical in that in her upper-class social niche, it was

even less acceptable for an educated woman who had “married well” to work outside the

home. Her role, in the parlance of the time, was to use her education, talents and

affluence to raise accomplished children. That emphasis on child nurture and education

was to be used to keep “sons out of the work force in order to extend their education and

improve their chances for upward mobility.”30 Isabel Beecher worked outside the home

and also engaged in appropriate parenting, even though there was a shift in the

distribution of responsibilities in her home. Most important, that shift in her family and in

others did not lead to the destruction of the moral fiber of the nation. In fact, men

increasingly, though still not in great numbers, stepped up and filled some of the gaps left

by working women. While the traditional spheres had overlapped, there were distinct

boundaries in some areas, many of which are exemplified in both the family life and the 29 John N. Beecher, Letter from John Beecher to Dr. Graham C. Wilson, English

Department Chair, San Francisco State University, 13 August 1979. Barbara Beecher.

30 Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place,” 24.

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lucrative work of Isabel Beecher. In newspapers around the country, the reviews

following her appearances always identified her as a “lady reader,” called her “Mrs.

Beecher,” and almost without fail mentioned her “charming womanliness” or “womanly

manner.”31

While the records of Chautauquas frequently refer to Isabel Beecher as one of the

most popular, talented, and accomplished performers on the circuit, and while her

husband took on what were certainly traditionally maternal roles in her absence, their

comfort in pushing the traditional boundaries was not publicly recognized. When

Leonard Beecher, then 70 years old, announced his retirement from Tennessee Coal and

Iron in 1937, the Age-Herald in Birmingham wrote, “For more than a quarter of a

century, Mr. Beecher has been one of the outstanding men of business and industry in

this district – as the chief financial officer of our largest company. In the social, religious,

cultural and charitable activities of this city Mrs. Beecher has been an equally notable and

beloved figure.”32 Nowhere did they suggest that Isabel had generated income for the

family, that she had, in fact, provided a significant amount of financial support, especially

when J. P. Morgan’s buyouts affected the steel industry that employed Leonard. As far as

the local newspaper was concerned, Isabel Beecher’s public life extended no farther than

her Birmingham neighborhood’s Highland Book Club luncheons and other functions

appropriate for a woman in that place and time. In one fell swoop, the newspaper

affirmed what Alexis de Tocqueville had observed a century earlier when he said, “In no

country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines

31 Charles Ludwig Wagner, Interpretive Recitals with Isabel Garghill Beecher, advertisement, 1905, Barbara Beecher, Burnsville, NC.

32 “Two Among Many,” The Birmingham Age-Herald, 9 October 1937.

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of action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two

pathways that are always different.”33

Those differing pathways were evident for Isabel Beecher, who was a lady, an artist,

and the mother of a son who became a poet and held many of her sensibilities about art

and literature. On the other hand, he was a poet who wrote of oppressed people and racial

hatred in the South and who chose to serve on an integrated ship in World War II. “His

mother was very proud of his literary progress, if not his topics,” Barbara Beecher said.

“She was two people really. In Birmingham, they thought she was a grand lady who had

a grand home and assumed she was a woman of wealth. In reality, she was raised in a

mining town and had risen above it, and she was somewhat a snob.” In Isabel’s later

years, “she came to understand him more,” Barbara Beecher said. “They became good

friends and he felt much more at ease.” Indeed, he may have felt again like the young

man in college whose mother’s dramatic presence and pursuits won the hearts of his

classmates. That was enough, however. As she said then, she could not become a stage

actress because she was first a wife and mother. She might stretch the limits of her role,

but she clearly respected them.34

There are still some unanswered questions, however, about how Beecher managed to

move so smoothly between her public and private worlds. For example, what is the role

of class in her ability to move into the public sphere? Does family name impact this

ability? Did her employment help the family finances in hard times, and if so how did

that impact her marriage? Regardless of the unanswered questions, she remains a

33 Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place,” 9.

34 Barbara Beecher, interview, 9 December 2007.

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significant example of a woman who clearly lived in the public sphere during the early

twentieth century, while she maintained a cloak of womanhood.

Isabel Garghill Beecher followed in the footsteps of her husband’s female ancestors,

Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Isabel Beecher Hooker, and pushed

against some of the period’s mores while actively raising her cultural voice in the public

sphere. With the support of her family, she became an active individual with a

distinguished voice, both literally and figuratively. She is an interesting case study of a

woman who managed to move into the public sphere and yet remain “a grand lady and a

fascinating woman.”35 Even as the lens of history and of historians widened, the concept

of separate spheres remained anchored in political and social history for generations. In

the twenty-first century, vestiges of the spheres remain, and scholars in the academy and

protesters in the streets have not yet bridged the divide that separates the feminine and the

powerful.

35 Ibid.

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