Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 13, 1811. She was the seventh of nine children born to Roxana Foote Beecher, the granddaughter of a Revolutionary general, and Lyman Beecher, a blacksmith’s son and Congregational minister. Her mother died when Harriet was five years old, and her father remarried a year later; her stepmother would give birth to four more children. Harriet often visited at the home of her widowed maternal grandmother and unmarried aunt, who instructed her in religion and taught her needlework. Her mother and aunts, although necessarily practiced in domestic skills like spinning and weaving, had also been unusually well educated for young women of their time, and Harriet’s early association with the Foote family probably contributed not only to the intellectual curiosity she would have all her life, but also to her confidence that she could combine a career as writer with that of housewife and mother.
At the age of six, Harriet entered primary school and two years later was enrolled in the Litchfield Female Academy. She seems in some ways to have been a rather odd little girl, bright and talented in her schoolwork but also full of mischief, shy but at the same time hungry for attention. Fortunately, her father was proud of her intelligence and imagination. He encouraged her progress in school; indeed, he was to be supportive of her all his life, and the entire Beecher family was to remain close. At thirteen, after listening to one of her father’s sermons, Harriet experienced a personal “conversion” and committed herself to Christianity, a commitment she would renew throughout her life.
At about the same age, Harriet moved to the larger city of Hartford, Connecticut, and entered the Hartford Female Seminary, a private secondary school founded a few years earlier by her older sister Catharine Beecher. Harriet was to remain until she was 21, first as a student and, from 1827 to 1832, as a teacher. One of the first American schools for women, the seminary featured classes in many traditional male school subjects such as grammar, composition, English literature, logic, rhetoric and oratory, Latin, and ethics, as well as French, Italian, drawing, and music. Catharine also emphasized the sciences, which she believed were slighted in women’s education; her pupils’ studies included chemistry, “natural philosophy” (what we would probably call “earth science”), geometry, and astronomy. They also studied geography, and in her last year at the Hartford school, Harriet wrote and published a geography textbook that would remain in print for some years and be adopted by numerous schools.
