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Isabella Beecher Hooker
Isabella Beecher Hooker portrait by C. M. Bell Studio
Born
Isabella Holmes Beecher

(1822-02-22)February 22, 1822
Litchfield, Connecticut
DiedJanuary 25, 1907(1907-01-25) (aged 84)
Hartford, Connecticut
OccupationSuffragist
SpouseJohn Hooker
ChildrenThomas Beecher Hooker
Mary Beecher Hooker
Alice Beecher Hooker
Edward Beecher Hooker
Parent(s)Lyman and Harriet Beecher

Isabella Beecher Hooker (February 22, 1822 – January 25, 1907) was a leader, lecturer and social activist in the American suffragist movement.

Early life[edit]

Isabella Holmes Beecher was born February 22, 1822, in a famous family in Litchfield, Connecticut. She was the fifth child and second daughter of famous Harriet Porter and the Reverend Lyman Beecher.[1] Her father had married three times; his first two wives died. Isabella Holmes Beecher was born by his second wife, Harriet Porter Beecher. Harriet was a wealthy woman who was not ready to marry such an influential minister, nor to be the mother of eight children of Lyman’s first late wife. As her father was called to new congregations, all followed him to Boston, and then Cincinnati. In Cincinnati, she attended her sister Catharine's Western Female Institute.[2] The Western Female Institute closed during the Panic of 1837, not long after Isabella's mother Harriet died.[3] Then, at age fifteen, she returned to Connecticut for an additional year of schooling at the Hartford Female Seminary, the first school her sister Catherine had founded. Catherine was no longer involved with that school.[4]

Marriage[edit]

While studying in Hartford, she met John Hooker, a famous young lawyer from an established Connecticut family.[5] John Hooker was very enthusiastic to marry her, but she knew that the marriage contract was the last legal document a woman ever signed, and she wanted none of that.[6] John was persistent and they married in 1841, and she spent most of the following twenty-five years raising their three children. John brought a reformist attitude to the marriage; just before their marriage, John made his abolitionist sympathies known. she did not immediately approve of her husband's position, but she gradually converted to the anti-slavery cause.[7] Throughout the 1850s, Isabella Beecher Hooker supported the abolitionist cause, but her primary activity was motherhood. [8]

These early tendencies toward domesticity were likely an influence of her sister Catherine's philosophy. The Hooker family moved to Hartford in 1853 and purchased a land with Francis and Elisabeth Gillette, which formed the first homesteads of what would become the Nook Farm[9] Literary Colony.[10] First she tried to focus on what the world told her was most important—her children.[11]


Activism[edit]

Isabella Beecher Hooker soon started getting frustrated and reached out to Elizabeth Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott and other suffragists.[12] Isabella Beecher Hooker first attending a few women's rights conventions in New York and Boston, and participated in the founding of the New England Women Suffrage Association. Then, she made her intentions known to her friends and neighbors in Hartford by founding the Connecticut Women Association and Society for the Study of Political Science.[13] Isabella Beecher Hooker followed this up with a petition to the Connecticut General Assembly. With the legal aid of her husband, she wrote and presented a bill that provided married women with property rights.[14] The bill was rejected, but she reintroduced it every year until it passed in 1877.[15]

By 1870, Isabella Beecher Hooker was in the full swing of the suffragist movement traveling throughout the mid-west on her first speaking tour.[13] This first of many tours was in preparation for the 1871 Washington convention on suffrage, which focused on just suffrage alone, not women's rights in general. Isabella thought that by building the convention around one issue, she could re-unite the divided women's movement.[16] Isabella Beecher Hooker set the agenda by describing the situation as she saw it, a view in which the constitution provided women with citizenship, and congress only needed to recognize this fact for women suffrage to be a done deal.[17] This convention got the women's movement in the congressional door, for the first time Congress responded to the women activists with a hearing. Victoria Woodhull led the presentation to the House Judiciary Committee, and she followed; they both presented the convention's argument.[18]

Isabella Beecher Hooker maintained the constitutional argument for most of the 1870s and used it for the many additional times she spoke before the House Judiciary Committee.[19] She believed this argument partly because she thought it would be too difficult to get a constitutional amendment passed. However, most of the congressmen rejected the suffragists' notions, and contended that Congress could not intervene in voter eligibility.[20] However, Isabella Beecher Hooker felt so strongly that women could already technically vote, that she and other women activists tried to vote in the election of 1872; while Susan Anthony succeeded, and was arrested, Isabella Beecher Hooker was unable to penetrate the security at the polling station.[21]

By the mid-1880s, Isabella Beecher Hooker advocated the more common position that women should vote because they would bring a new level of dignity to politics.[22] Along with her drift in strategy, Isabella Beecher Hooker was campaigning for women's rights in general, instead of focusing on suffrage alone. During 1887, she spoke on the need for women to have greater roles in society, including the benefits of female police officers.[23] She digressed on a campaign for police reform than included complete reorganization of New York City's police department, with a woman as superintendent; for this she was mocked by the New York World and the Chicago Tribune.[24]

While Isabella Beecher Hooker was derided in New York and Chicago, she had enough national stature that her speaking tours were regularly reported. Furthermore, she gained respect in Hartford, where The Hartford Courant published her lectures from around the country and her congressional addresses. As she wound down her travels she was able to use this avenue to continue her advocacy. By the turn of the century she journeyed less frequently to speak, but maintained her activity by writing letters, and her annual presentation of a voting bill to the Connecticut General Assembly.[25] She made one last appearance before Congress in 1893, where she persuaded various senators to endorse a limited suffrage proposal.[26] Her last appearance before the General Assembly to present the voting bill was in 1901.[27]


Death[edit]

Isabella Beecher Hooker was at the side of her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe when she died at her Hartford home in 1896.[28] Hooker was crippled by a stroke on January 13, 1907, and died twelve days later.[29] While she died more than a decade before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, her participation in the women's movement saw it transformed from a fringe group to the respectable lobby that succeeded in 1920. Within her native state of Connecticut Isabella Hooker contributed primary in her advocacy for women's property rights, which passed into law in 1877.


Notes[edit]

  1. ^ "Beecher Family". Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. Archived from the original on 23 August 2010. Retrieved 3 December 2011.
  2. ^ White, Barbara A. (2003). The Beecher Sisters. Yale University Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-300-09927-0.
  3. ^ White. (2003). p. 21.
  4. ^ https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/catharine-esther-beecher. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  5. ^ Stowe, Lyman Beecher (1934). Saints, Sinners, and Beechers. The Bobbs – Merrill Company. p. 344.
  6. ^ "Looking Back: Tempest Tossed, the Story of Isabella Beecher Hooker | Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project". Retrieved 2019-07-12.
  7. ^ Rugoff, Milton (1981). The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century. Harper and Row. p. 284. ISBN 978-0-06-014859-1.
  8. ^ "Isabella Beecher Hooker". WikiVividly.
  9. ^ "Stowe's Hartford Neighborhood, Nook Farm". Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. Archived from the original on 2017-07-04.
  10. ^ Rugoff. (1981). p. 285.
  11. ^ "Looking Back: Tempest Tossed, the Story of Isabella Beecher Hooker | Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project".
  12. ^ "Looking Back: Tempest Tossed, the Story of Isabella Beecher Hooker | Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project".

    Activism[edit]

    Following the Civil War, Isabella carefully ventured into the divided women's movement with the unsigned "A Mother's Letter to a Daughter on Women Suffrage", which relied on the idea that, "women would raise the moral level of politics and bring a motherly wisdom to the affairs of government."<ref>Rugoff. (1981). p. 427.

  13. ^ a b Stowe. (1934). p. 347.
  14. ^ Stowe. (1934). p. 350.
  15. ^ Hooker, Isabella. "Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers". River Campus Libraries.
  16. ^ White. (2003). p. 141.
  17. ^ Hooker, Isabella Beecher (26 January 1871). "Women Suffrage in Washington". The Independent. p. 1.
  18. ^ White. (2003). p. 165.
  19. ^ "Mrs. Hooker in Washington". The Hartford Courant. 4 February 1878. p. 1.
  20. ^ White. (2003). p. 167.
  21. ^ White. (2003). p. 200.
  22. ^ "A Woman President". Boston Globe. 3 December 1888. p. 2.
  23. ^ "Female Policemen". The National Police Gazette. 23 April 1887. p. 2.
  24. ^ "The Model Policewoman". Chicago Daily Tribune. 17 April 1887. p. 29.
  25. ^ Rugoff. (1981). p. 589.
  26. ^ "Mrs. Hooker's Hearing". The Hartford Courant. 20 April 1893. p. 3.
  27. ^ Hooker, John. "John Hooker (abolitionist)". WikiVisually.
  28. ^ Wolfe Boynton, Cynthia. Remarkable Women of Hartford. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014: 33. ISBN 978-1-62619-320-8
  29. ^ "Last of Beecher Family is Dead". The Hartford Courant. 25 January 1907. p. 1.
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