Catharine Beecher and the American Woman's Puritan Home

Catharine Beecher's publications on household management, published between 1841 and 1869, offered architectural designs with a surprisingly consistent feature: they promoted the long-forgotten center-chimney New England house plan. For Beecher, that remnant of the Puritan era promised a radically new lifestyle, one that profoundly undercut the domestic social rituals of her time.