Catharine Beecher

(1800 - 1878)

After her mother died in 1816, Catharine Beecher, then a teenager, ran the family household and largely raised her younger siblings, including the future preacher Henry Ward Beecher, author Harriet Beecher Stowe, and suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker. With her father, she operated schools for women in the Western territories. She is considered the founder of modern home economics; her Treatise on Domestic Economy was the first complete guide to housekeeping published in America and was reprinted about once every year through the 1860s and 1870s.