In 1869 Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe published a compendium of advice to women entitled The American Woman's Home. This popular and influential book urged its readers to construct homes that could also serve as schools and as churches. Beecher and Stowe sketched for their readers a Gothic revival cottage with a steeple for a chimney and a moveable screen to convert the parlor into a nave. This cottage that looked like a church poses the fundamental question underlying Colleen McDannell's book: why and how did Victorian Americans conceive such close connections between the home and religious observance?