She taught school for a few years after attending Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy with her siblings (including Harriet Beecher Stowe), while their father, Reverend Lyman Beecher, was religious advisor to the school. In 1823, Catherine and her sister Mary opened a school in Hartford, which was incorporated in 1827 as the Hartford Female Seminary. Catherine advocated endowments to provide financial stability and teachers who were specialists in their fields. In 1831, Catherine Beecher’s last year at her Hartford Seminary, the catalog listed ten trustees (local ministers and attorneys), eleven teachers (all women) and 223 students, the majority from outside the Hartford area. Beecher moved to Cincinnati in 1831 with her family and founded the short-lived and financially unstable Western Female Institute, the first of what she hoped would become a series of western female seminaries. Thereafter, Beecher dedicated her efforts to writing and speaking about education for women, while the Hartford Female Seminary continued to educate thousands of young women until 1882. Records from the Hartford Female Seminary, including many yearly catalogs listing trustees, faculty and students can be found at the
Connecticut Historical Society.