Hooker, Isabella Beecher

Life Span
to
Full name
Isabella Beecher Hooker
Place of Birth
Burial Place
Birth Date Certainty
Exact
Death Date Certainty
Exact
Gender
Female
Race
White
Sectional choice
North
Origins
Free State
No. of Siblings
10
No. of Spouses
1
No. of Children
4
Family
Lyman Beecher (father), Harriet Porter (mother), Henry Ward Beecher (half-brother), Catharine Beecher (half-sister), Harriet Beecher Stowe (half-sister), John Hooker (husband, 1841)
Education
Other
Other Education
Hartford Female Seminary, CT; Western Female Institute, OH
Occupation
Writer or Artist
Relation to Slavery
White non-slaveholder
Other Affiliations
Women’s Rights

Isabella Beecher Hooker (American National Biography)

Scholarship
In 1868, with her two daughters married and her youngest child nearing majority, Hooker returned to public life with the publication of "A Mother's Letters to a Daughter on Woman's Suffrage" in Putnam's Magazine. Over the next forty years, until her death in Hartford, Hooker refined her arguments for and deepened her commitment to the cause of women's rights. From the tentative and unpublished essay "Shall Women Vote? A Matrimonial Dialogue" (1860) through her influential treatise called Womanhood: Its Sanctities and Fidelities (1873) to her last published tract, An Argument on United States Citizenship (1902), Hooker imagined and argued for a democratic society that made public use of the knowledge and virtue gained by women in their domestic struggles. Women, she maintained, should be judges and juries because they learned to adjudicate at home, equitably settling passionate disputes among their children. Women learned to legislate at home as well, quietly persuading others and spending patient years urging projects forward to completion. Hooker argued that wife- and motherhood provided the best possible training for government service, a view that, for her, made woman suffrage all the more urgent.
Sharon Ann Holt, "Hooker, Isabella Beecher," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00342.html.
Chicago Style Entry Link
Hooker, Isabella Beecher. Womanhood: Its Sanctities and Fidelities. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1873. view record
Rugoff, Milton Allan. The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. view record
White, Barbara Anne. The Beecher Sisters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. view record
How to Cite This Page: "Hooker, Isabella Beecher," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/23204.