Isabella Beecher Hooker

• Isabella Hooker
• Born: February 22, 1822
• Died: January 25, 1907

Suffragist, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, the youngest of five daughters and eleventh of thirteen children of the Rev. Lyman Beecher. The four youngest, including Isabella, were children of Beecher and his second wife, Harriet (Porter) Beecher. Most of the children, including the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Catharine Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, led, like their father, lives of public distinction.

In 1826 the family moved to Boston, where Lyman Beecher became pastor of the Hanover Street Church. Six years later, when he was appointed president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, the family moved again. When Harriet Beecher died, in 1835, Isabella Beecher went to live with a half-sister, Mary Beecher Perkins, in Hartford, Connecticut, where she attended the Hartford Female Seminary. In 1841 she married John Hooker, son of a distinguished local family and a successful lawyer; they had four children: Thomas (who died as an infant in 1842); Mary (born in 1845); Alice (born in 1847); and Edward (born in 1855).

After ten years of residence at Farmington, Connecticut, the Hookers moved to a large tract of land near Hartford called Nook Farm. They were soon joined by a number of friends and relatives, among them Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who also built houses there.

Isabella Hooker’s interest in reform did not take a public aspect until 1868, when she became a founder of the New England Woman Suffrage Association and organized the convention that founded the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association. She was president of the Connecticut association until 1905. Her interest in women’s rights had grown slowly in discussions with her husband about the various legal disabilities under which women lived. She began to attend lectures by such prominent feminists as Anna Dickinson (in 1861) and soon numbered among her acquaintances Carolina Severance, Paulina Wright Davis, and Susan B. Anthony.

In 1870 Hooker and her husband began a campaign in the state legislature for a married women’s property bill, which finally passed in 1877. Also in 1870, she addressed the second annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). The following year, in Washington D.C., she organized and convened, at her own expense, a special convention that discussed ways to achieve a federal suffrage amendment. She remained in town for several years afterward in her quest for the amendment and in 1872 spoke before a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

At the end of the year, however, Hooker became embroiled in a bitter family quarrel that diverted her attention from reform. In November, when her half-brother Henry Ward Beecher was publicly accused of adultery, she openly expressed her belief that he was guilty (investigations by his church and by a board of Congregational ministers declared him innocent). Her brothers and sisters, appalled by this breach of family solidarity, made her so uncomfortable that she and her husband left for a vacation in Europe.

When the uproar had abated, Hooker returned to her suffrage work, addressing conventions of the National Woman Suffrage Association and testifying before Congress. At the tenth annual Washington convention of the NWSA, for example, she spoke on the topic “Reconstructed Police,” advocating that the police force be divided equally between men and women. In 1892 she prepared a memorial from the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Society asking that the word male be stricken from the article conferring the vote in the state constitution. She was unable to get permission to present it to the legislators, however.

In 1893 Hooker was one of two Connecticut delegates on the Board of Lady Managers of the Chicago World’s Fair. By then, however, the pace of her reform activity had begun to slow, and she ceased to be publicly active after 1905. She died at eighty-four in Hartford of a cerebral hemorrhage and was buried there in Cedar Hill Cemetery. Although born a Congregationalist, she had become a Unitarian in adult life.

Hooker was a visable, vocal, and important member of the late-nineteenth century suffrage movement. In her zeal for reform she sometimes overlooked the sensitivities of other persons. Lyman Beecher, the twentieth-century biographer of his family, noted that she felt commissioned by God to carry out His will—a commission that “gave her complete self-assurance and naturally tended to develop an autocratic manner.”

Hooker’s diary for 1876-1877 is in the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. Some letters are in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College. Her writings include Relation of Woman Suffrage to the Home and Morality (n.d.); Womanhood: Its Sanctities and Fidelities (1874); “A Mother’s Letters to a Daughter on Woman’s Suffrage,” published anonymously in Putnam’s Monthly (November-December 1868) and republished under her own name in 1870; and “The Last of the Beechers: Memories on My Eighty-third Birthday,” Connecticut Magazine, May 1905. The best recent account is in Notable American Women (1971). This may be supplemented with L. Beecher, Saints, Sinners and Beechers (1934) and scattered items in E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 2-4 (1881-1902). See also M. Rugoff, The Beechers: An American Family in the 19th Century (1981).