Isabella Beecher Hooker PDF

# Isabella Beecher Hooker February 22, 1822-January 25, 1907 ## Can Anything Be Plainer Than That a Woman, Being a "Person," Is a Citizen? Isabella Beecher Hooker lived in the shadow of a famous sister. Her older sister, Harriet, had written _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, a powerful novel that shed light o...

# Isabella Beecher Hooker February 22, 1822-January 25, 1907 ## Can Anything Be Plainer Than That a Woman, Being a "Person," Is a Citizen? Isabella Beecher Hooker lived in the shadow of a famous sister. Her older sister, Harriet, had written _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, a powerful novel that shed light on the horrors of slavery. After the book's publication in 1852, only the Bible sold more copies than Harriet Beecher Stowe's book. But it was another piece of writing that stirred Isabella's heart. One day in 1859, she read a magazine article titled "Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?" Education was an issue close to Isabella's heart-her own had been spotty and uninspiring. The writer pointed out the flaw in thinking that women could be educated to a point but not attend college. That women could sing in public, but not speak in public. And, most bitingly, that women could drop a piece of paper into a mailbox, but not a ballot box. Isabella was so dazzled that she wrote the author a fan letter. She was thrilled when he wrote back! Thomas Wentworth Higginson urged her to follow in the footsteps of women who held the same beliefs, women like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone. It was many years before Isabella took that advice. At the time, she was married and raising three children. She was leading the same conventional life she had seen her own mother live. She had grown up in a household crammed with children, first in Connecticut and then Ohio. Her brothers had all gone to college, while she and her sisters had dipped in and out of school. Her father, the famous preacher Lyman Beecher, didn't think much of educating girls. ## Isabella's Life of Learning Isabella yearned for a life of learning. In 1841 she married a lawyer, John Hooker, and often would take her knitting to his office so they could read together. One day, he read from a law book that explained how upon marriage a woman loses her legal identity-how she no longer exists. Isabella argued the point, but at last dropped it as “a hopeless mystery." ## Isabella's Fight for Women's Rights Although Isabella hadn't taken Higginson's advice to join the women's rights movement right away, she did write her own article just one year after his. In "Shall Women Vote?" she argued that women have enough life experience as wives, mothers, and household managers to be intelligent voters. But still, she straddled the fence. “I would not open the polls to women today-no, nor next year, nor ever, unless public opinion demanded it.” She was not ready to act yet, but the idea of woman suffrage had been planted in her mind. In 1869, ten years after she read Higginson's words, Isabella began writing to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and finally she heard them speak. Now she was ready to take Higginson's advice. “With equal political rights come equal social and industrial opportunities,” she wrote, promising to work with the suffragists. In the suffrage cause, Isabella's sister Harriet became her role model. “My sister's book, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' . . . had such an influence in the abolition cause that it gave me an incentive to do the best I could to emancipate women,” she said. Isabella regretted the rift in the suffrage movement that pitted suffragists against each other. She wanted to unite the two sides that had split over whether African American men should gain the vote before women. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment granting African American men the vote had passed, but the suffrage groups continued to work separately. Isabella presided over a convention in 1871 in which she tried to mend fences, urging everyone to agree that the Constitution, speaking as it did of "people," already granted women the right to vote. "Can anything be plainer than that a woman, being a 'person,' is a citizen, and being a ‘citizen' has the citizen's right to vote?" she asked. The suffrage groups didn't reunite until 1890, but Isabella got the process started. Isabella's greatest triumph came in gaining married women the right to own property in her home state. For eight years, she tried to persuade the Connecticut General Assembly to consider a bill granting that right. Finally, in 1877, it passed, and women in Connecticut no longer had to turn over their property to their husbands. Isabella never let up on suffrage. Every year until 1901, she presented a suffrage bill before the Connecticut General Assembly. In 1893, she persuaded several U.S. senators to back a limited national suffrage proposal. Women-Isabella's people, her citizens-were getting closer to the vote. ## Isabella's Family Families often argue, and Isabella's family was no different. She and her siblings fought over issues big and small. Isabella worked to gain the vote, but her sister Catharine declared that women didn't need it. Their job was to be the moral, stable heart of the family. It bothered Isabella that Catharine wanted to limit women's lives, especially since Catharine was single and childless and never had a home of her own. The family also had a falling-out over charges that Isabella's brother Henry, a famous preacher like his father, had had an affair with a married woman. In the resulting scandal and trial, some of the siblings maintained he was innocent, while Isabella insisted he was guilty and pressed him to confess. Later in Isabella's life, the family became alarmed about her belief in Spiritualism. Spiritualists thought that spirits from beyond the grave could speak, give advice, and see the future. Isabella attended séances, put up shrines to dead loved ones, and claimed to channel their words. Some family members limited contact with her or, at times, completely disowned her, but most of the family reconciled with Isabella before her death.