Detail from a full-length portrait of Isabella Beecher Hooker – Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Sewall Collection

Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822–1907)

Isabella Beecher Hooker was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on February 22, 1822. A member of the famous Beecher family, her father was the renowned minister Lyman Beecher, her brother was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, and her half-sisters were educational reformer Catharine Beecher and author/activist Harriet Beecher Stowe. She married influential attorney John Hooker at age 19 and her family moved to Hartford where they purchased a homestead that eventually became part of Nook Farm (a literary and intellectual enclave in the late 19th century). There she dedicated her life to both her family and to the enfranchisement of women. She founded the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and drafted a bill her state legislator introduced that granted property rights to women. She remained a leader of the woman suffrage movement, at both the local and national levels, right up until her death in 1907.

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Looking Back: Tempest Tossed, the Story of Isabella Beecher Hooker

Isabella Beecher was a suffragist and spiritualist who shunned traditional female roles while alienating large parts of her family during her brother's adultery scandal. …[more]

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“Finding Aid to the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association Inventory of Records.” 2016. Connecticut State Library. https://cslarchives.ctstatelibrary.org/repositories/2/resources/622 (March 15, 2012).
“Isabella Beecher Hooker Collection.” Connecticut Digital Archive. https://ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/search/mods_titleInfo_title_mt%3A%28Isabella%5C%20Beecher%5C%20Hooker%29%20OR%20mods_subject_name_personal_namePart_mt%3A%28Isabella%5C%20Beecher%5C%20Hooker%29.
“Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.” 2017. https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/.
“Isabella Beecher Hooker.” 2014. Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame. https://www.cwhf.org/inductees/isabella-beecher-hooker (February 2, 2015).
“Isabella Beecher Hooker.” 2015. Cedar Hill Cemetery Foundation. http://cedarhillfoundation.org/notable-residents/isabella-beecher-hooker/ (September 10, 2015).
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Susan B. Anthony. 1872. Memorial of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Elizabeth L. Bladen, Olympia Brown, Susan B. Anthony, and Josephine L. Griffing, to the Congress of the United States, and the Arguments Thereon Before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate,. Washington, DC: Chronicle Publishing Company. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112005635054.
Mair, Margaret Granville, and Stowe-Day Foundation. The Isabella Beecher Hooker Project: A Microfiche Edition of Her Papers and Suffrage-Related Correspondence Owned by the Stowe-Day Foundation. The Foundation.
Campbell, Susan. 2014. Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Hooker, Isabella Beecher. 1902. An Argument on United States Citizenship Before the Constitutional Convention of the State of Connecticut, Sitting in Hartford, During January, 1902. Hartford, CT. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.35112105062360.
Boydston, Jeanne, Mary Kelley, and Anne Throne Margolis. 1988. The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.