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Catharine Beecher and the Mechanical Body: Physiology, Evangelism, and American Social Reform from the Antebellum Period to the Gilded Age

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Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth century to the Gilded Age, Catharine Beecher and other American social reformers combined natural theology and evangelism to instruct their audiences how to lead healthy, virtuous, and happy lives. Worried about the consequences of urbanization, industrialization, unstable sexual and gender roles, and immigration, these “Christian physiologists” provided prescriptive scientific advice for hygiene and personal conduct based on the traditional norms of white, middle-class, Protestant domesticity. According to Beecher and her counterparts, the biosocial reproduction of ideal American households promised to reverse the degeneration of men and women across the country and to ensure the long-term vitality of their children. Using evidence from Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and other nineteenth-century writers, I investigate the methods and aims of Christian physiology along with its relationships to natural theology, Darwinian feminism, and other reform movements. I also analyze how Beecher and her successors employed concepts including the machine, the tissue, the cell, and the germ to justify their conclusions about the optimal structure and functions of American society. Overall, I demonstrate how these actors leveraged the body and the family as mechanisms to produce healthy parents, children, and communities for an ailing nation.

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Notes

  1. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe expressed similar perspectives on social reform and the family, but Beecher dedicated more of her career to explaining and applying the laws of God and nature. Based on this fact and the extensive overlap between the physiological content of the Treatise on Domestic Economy, Letters to the People on Health and Happiness, and American Woman’s Home, this essay focuses on Beecher.

  2. See Beecher (1857, pp. ix-xxxiv and 281–336). For the biographies and religious convictions of Catharine and her family, see Haynes (1998, pp. 47–76); Sklar (1973); and White (2003).

  3. For three examples of books defining Christian physiologists as popularizers rather than medical practitioners or intellectuals, see Green (1986); Haynes (2015); and Sappol (2002).

  4. Beecher alluded to Paley throughout her career and routinely cited the Scottish surgeon Charles Bell (1777–1842), who wrote the influential Bridgewater Treatise entitled The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (1833). For references to Bell, see Beecher (1843, pp. 129–130, 214–219, and 356).

  5. All emphases from quotations here and elsewhere come directly from the cited sources. Compare this excerpt from Beecher with the description of mills from Paley (1802, pp. 10–11).

  6. See Paley (1802, pp. 527–548). For the significance of the “problem of evil” to religious interpretations of biology, see Ruse (2015, pp. 407–412).

  7. Christian physiology does not fit neatly along the axis from radical to conservative because it sought to overhaul middle-class norms and to make these norms compulsory. For the reform and social control theories of midcentury hygiene, compare Hayden (2013, pp. 79–111) and Burbick (1994, pp. 77–112).

  8. For the application of the same foot-binding analogy to tight-fitting shoes, see Nichols (1842, pp. 61–63).

  9. For the gendered history of calisthenics, see Green (1986, pp. 85–100) and Taketani (2003, pp. 62–81).

  10. See Beecher and Stowe (2004, pp. 97–106). For the dietary advice of Alcott and Graham, see especially Walters (1978, pp. 147–156); Whorton (1982, pp. 62–91); and DuPuis (2015, pp. 17–53).

  11. Compare Beecher and Stowe (2004, pp. 109–110) with Maudsley (1867). For the history of delirium tremens and the nineteenth-century medicalization of alcoholism, see Osborn (2014).

  12. Freund (2012) describes how Americans used sunshine to eliminate germs from the Gilded Age to the 1930s, but only briefly explains the relevance of sunlight to midcentury physiology.

  13. The reference to leucoemia from this passage indicates that Beecher and Stowe had at least some familiarity with German cellular pathology. See Harris (1999, pp. 131–137).

  14. Reynolds (2010), p. 195. For the intellectual history of cell theory, see Harris (1999) and Reynolds (2018).

  15. For the principles of mechanism and vitalism, see Canguilhem (2008, pp. 59–97) and Eddy (2015, pp. 108–109).

  16. For Spencer and his theory of social evolution, see Spencer ([1861] 1911) and Bowler (2003, pp. 220–223).

  17. Charles Darwin introduced pangenesis in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) to elucidate how biophysical changes to tissue cells could influence germ cells and sexual reproduction. Beecher and Stowe may also have drawn their teleological perception of nature and society from the recapitulation theory of the German embryologist Ernst Haeckel. For nineteenth-century frameworks of cellular heredity, see Müller-Wille and Rheinberger (2012, pp. 71–94) and Reynolds (2018, pp. 19–45).

  18. For additional professional criticism of contemporary “show” parlors, see Leavitt (2002, pp. 28–39).

  19. The word colony, interestingly, can refer to clusters of cells as well as settlements on foreign soil (“Colony, N., 2011” Oxford English Dictionary).

  20. Rudolf Virchow and other scientists posited tentative connections between cell division, the nucleus, and heredity from the 1850s onward. See Müller-Wille and Rheinberger (2012, pp. 71–94).

  21. For the scientific connections between cells, honeycombs, and evolution, see Canguilhem (2008, p. 30) and Hale (2020a, b).

  22. For the history of mission societies and settlement houses, see Walters (1978); Walton (2005); and Evans (2017).

  23. Proponents of the zymotic theory of disease applied the word germ to chemicals as well as microbes and did not deny the reality of airborne miasmas. For the gradual transition from the zymotic theory to germ theory, see Tomes (2000, pp. 21–87) and Kiechle (2017).

  24. Unfortunately, Beecher and Stowe did not cite their source for this description, but the American physician James Henry Salisbury and German botanist Ernst Hallier wrote contemporary treatises on germ theory with microscopic plates along these lines. The Beecher sisters might also have refocused on infectious diseases for personal reasons after Harriet lost her infant son Samuel Stowe to the 1849 cholera epidemic. See Boydston et al. (1988, pp. 74–77).

  25. For complementary interpretations of the metaphorical significance of cells, see Otis (1999).

  26. For the late-nineteenth-century movement to reform city tenements, see especially Handlin (1979, pp. 197–231); Hayden (2002, pp. 33–55); and Freund (2012, pp. 9–24).

  27. For the history of cooperative housekeeping, see Handlin (1979, pp. 386–409); Strasser (1982, pp. 194–201); and Hayden (2002, pp. 81–119).

  28. Frederick was the son of Mary Foote Beecher Perkins (1805–1900), the second daughter of Lyman Beecher and the least famous sister of Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

  29. For more information about the life and work of Gilman, see Rudd and Gough (1999) and Allen (2009).

  30. For the related histories of the home economics and municipal housekeeping movements, see especially Stage and Vincenti (1997) and Hoy (1995, pp. 72–121).

  31. For the history of turn-of-the-century eugenics and the receptiveness of Gilman to its proposals, see Kline (2001); Bashford and Levine (2010); and Allen (2009).

  32. For the related efforts of the domestic hygiene movement and the private side of public health, see Tomes (1990).

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Parry, A.I. Catharine Beecher and the Mechanical Body: Physiology, Evangelism, and American Social Reform from the Antebellum Period to the Gilded Age. J Hist Biol 54, 603–638 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-021-09658-1

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