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Catherine Beecher's American Home

Paula Petrik , Professor of History and Art History, George Mason University

Introduction

One of the foremost woman writers of the nineteenth century, Catherine Beecher (and her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe) was one of the chief proponents of the “cult of domesticity,” devoting much of her writing to domestic and household topics both ideological and practical. The purpose of this exercise is to discover how ideology affects the built environment.

Updated | April 2004