Isabella Beecher Hooker

Isabella Beecher Hooker
Isabella Beecher Hooker
Born	(1822-02-22)February 22, 1822 Litchfield, Connecticut
Died	January 25, 1907(1907-01-25) (aged 84) Hartford, Connecticut
Occupation	Suffragist
Spouse(s)	John Hooker
Children	Thomas 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 activist in the American Suffragist movement.

Isabella Holmes Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, the fifth child and second daughter of Harriet Porter and the Reverend Lyman Beecher. As her father was called to new congregations, Isabella followed him to Boston, and then Cincinnati. In Cincinnati she attended her sister Catharine's Western Female Institute. The Western Female Institute closed during the Panic of 1837, not long after Isabella's mother Harriet died. Then, at age fifteen, she then returned to Connecticut for an additional year of schooling at the Hartford Female Seminary, the first school her sister Catherine had founded, but was no longer involved with.

While studying in Hartford, Isabella met John Hooker, a young lawyer from an established Connecticut family. They married in 1841, and Isabella 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. Isabella did not immediately approve of her husband's position, but she gradually converted to the anti-slavery cause. Throughout the 1850s Isabella supported the abolitionist cause, but her primary activity was motherhood. 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 land with Francis and Elisabeth Gillette, which formed the first homesteads of what would become the Nook Farm Literary Colony.

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." Isabella 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 know to her friends and neighbors in Hartford by founding the Connecticut Women Association and Society for the Study of Political Science. Isabella 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. The bill was rejected, but she reintroduced it every year until it passed in 1877.