a biography of the day--isabella beecher hooker

Isabella Beecher Hooker

Dates: February 22, 1822 - January 25, 1907

Occupation: reformer, feminist

Known for: woman suffrage work

Also known as: Isabella Beecher, Isabella Hooker

Daughter of Rev. Lyman Beecher, half-sister of Henry Ward Beecher, Catherine Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Isabella Beecher Hooker grew up in Boston, Cincinnati and Hartford, Connecticut. Her much-older sister Catherine's schools comprised most of her education. In a family noted for good looks, Isabella had a particular reputation for beauty.

While attending Catherine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary, Isabella met John Hooker, a law student of a distinguished Connecticut family. They married, and he began a distinguished law career. In the 1850s, John Hooker joined with his brother-in-law in a business building homes outside Hartford on the site of Nook Farm, and Isabella Beecher Hooker, John and their children moved there. Other homeowners in the development came to include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dudley Warner, and Mark Twain.

Between cases, John Hooker read aloud from the law books of Blackstone, and Isabella was horrified to learn of the lack of legal rights for women. A gift from Anna Dickinson of some writing of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on women's rights, an 1864 meeting with Caroline Severance while nursing wounded in South Carolina, and finally, reading a pre-publication copy of Mill's On the Subjection of Women convinced Isabella to become involved in the woman's rights movement. Through her acquaintance with Caroline Severance, she met Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Paulina Wright Davis and other suffragists.

She soon joined with others in founding the New England Woman Suffrage Association. She took a leading role in planning and sponsoring woman's rights conventions in Connecticut, and supported a married women's property bill introduced into the legislature, drafted by her husband.

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http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_hooker_isabella.htm