cPARA [PAR@ ` STEXT ` EHooker, Isabella Beecher1822╨1907suffragistBorn in Litchfield, Connecticut, on February 22, 1822, Isabella Beecher was a daughter of the Reverend Lyman Beecher and a half sister of Henry Ward and Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She grew up from 1826 in Boston, from 1832 in Cincinnati, and from 1835 in Hartford, Connecticut, and was educated mainly in schools founded by her sister Catharine. In August 1841 she married John Hooker, a law student and descendant of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford. They lived in Farmington, Connecticut, for ten years and then returned to Hartford, where John Hooker and a brother-in-law bought a hundred-acre wooded tract, built houses for themselves, and sold lots to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain, and other prominent and congenial figures. Isabella Hooker╒s interest in the law and the legal status of women was first aroused early in her marriage by her husband╒s reading to her from Blackstone (whose position was that in marriage, man and wife are one person before the law, and that the woman has no separate legal existence). John Stuart Mill╒s essay on ╥The Enfranchisement of Women,╙ which she read in 1861, ten years after its first appearance, further stimulated her, as did his later The Subjection of Women. Under the influence of Caroline M. Severance she overcame her earlier disdain for crusading reformers and became an associate of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Paulina Wright Davis, and other women╒s-rights advocates. She helped organize the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, and her ╥Mother╒s Letters to a Daughter on Woman╒s Suffrage╙ appeared anonymously in Putnam╒s Magazine in November and December of that year. In 1869 she called and presided over the convention that organized the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association. From 1870 until success was achieved in 1877 she lobbied the Connecticut legislature vigorously in favor of a married women╒s property bill drafted by her husband. Hooker was a prominent speaker at the 1870 convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association in Washington, D.C., and she planned and financed a special convention in January 1871 at which a federal constitutional suffrage amendment was drawn up and presented to Congress. For a number of years she was much of the time in Washington, lobbying and testifying in behalf of the amendment. Her association with Victoria Woodhull dated from that campaign and soon became quite close. She sided with Woodhull when the latter publicly accused the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher of adultery and was thereafter shunned by most of her family. She also followed Woodhull into Spiritualist circles and for a time was convinced that she would soon be chosen by spirit powers to lead a matriarchal government of the world. She published Womanhood: Its Sanctities and Fidelities in 1874. She remained active in suffrage work for most of her life, continuing as president of the state organization until 1905. She was involved in planning the first International Convention of Women in 1888. In 1892 she supported Olympia Brown╒s Federal Suffrage Association. In 1893 she was one of Connecticut╒s two representatives on the Board of Lady Managers of the World╒s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Isabella Hooker died in Hartford, Connecticut, on January 25, 1907. fstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ # 5¬ / !I ╚ !I ▐ ┘ !I ▐ !I ▐ ≤ !I B 5¬ C !I
