Uncle Tom's Cabin

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.