in piety — in power of intellect — in power of controlling other minds. What will you find for her to do[?] … I do not want to see a woman of her talents and power put out of her place as a leader. She is formed to be a minister[’] s wife as much as you are for a minister. If you decide to be a lawyer I shall not be very much disappointed or troubled for tho’ I shall think you and Belle will in consequence be less useful and of course less happy, still I shall esteem it as the will of God that so it should be.14
In an October 1839 letter, Isabella wrote to John, “Every young man with the means of education and common sense is called to be a minister.” And: “I have felt for some weeks past in visiting my brothers — who are ministers — that they are the only class of men, that can accomplish any considerable amount of good without turning aside from their usual business — all that a minister does, is designed in some way to save the souls of his fellow human beings…. Now it seems to me that it is not thus with a lawyer….”
She was mostly parroting her sister Catharine’s much longer letters. It would be John’s first taste of his soon-to-be sister-in-law’s meddling, and he was savvy enough to remain reluctant to discuss the topic with Catharine, for fear she would share his correspondence with a wider audience.
But if Isabella was pushing John toward the pulpit, she didn’t seem committed to the task, and as she questioned the role of a minister, she also questioned the role of a minister’s wife. In a July 1839 letter to John, she called herself a “tempest-tossed spirit” and fretted whether she would be worthy of so well educated a spouse.
She was quick to announce that she would be as dutiful a wife as was necessary, but she wouldn’t enjoy the role much. In an August 1839 letter to John, she wrote that she would give him “the required obedience without being constantly reminded that such is the will of God and the exception of man.” But she continued that such submission was “galling to a sensible woman.”
John Hooker wrote back repeatedly that he intended them to be partners — which in any other man of that age may have been strictly a means of placating a nervous fiancée. But from John Hooker’s lifelong support of his wife and his dedication to the suffrage movement, he appears to have meant it.
Meanwhile, Mary Beecher Perkins — knowing her husband’s financial struggles and the hole his clerk’s career move would leave in Thomas Perkins’s office — was against John entering the clergy. In a November 1839 letter, she corrected her younger half-sister on her entreaties to her intended, sought to soften Lyman’s weighing in on the matter, and summoned for her argument a powerful ally, Isabella’s dear, departed mother:
I am surprised that father should have made the remark you ascribed to him that “every man of good common sense and piety ought to be a minister,” I am sure it was uttered in the enthusiasm of the moment and that his cooler judgment would not endorse it — what would become of society if that principle should be acted upon, do we not need pious lawyers and physicians and mechanics and farmers and teachers and ought they not to be men of common sense? … I believe the responsibility and excitement would soon consume him…. It seems to me you are all running wild on this subject — pray bring common sense to bear…. [T]hink of your own dear mother as well qualified by education and piety as you and with a better prospect of health, after marriage her health gave way, her spirits sank, and she was ever mourning that she was so useless as she appeared to herself to be, I do not believe she would advise the change.
Mary also wrote to Isabella that from all she saw and heard from John, any career choice other than law would be “to please you and not from a conviction that he is called of God to enter the sacred offices.” And she wrote, “I think it would be utter madness for you to marry a minister and I wonder at father and Catharine and Harriet that they should think of such a thing.”15
Meanwhile, many of the rest of Isabella’s siblings felt called to encourage John Hooker’s career change. As boisterous and as traveled and as learned as was the family’s collective approach to life, its members — save for Mary — simply could not understand a man living outside the ministry. In a November 18, 1839, letter from Charles, Isabella’s older half-brother, who would later face his own apostasy charges, took a page from his father’s hyperbole and wrote to a bewildered John: “You have never stood by the dark cave of Insanity — and looked with horror in at the dark door — and down the frightful chasms.” Nor, Charles wrote, had John ever heard “the hideous noises — the shrieks and the laughter — feeling meanwhile your own brain boil.”
Considering that threat of hellfire — or mental illness — and how tenacious she normally could be, Catharine took an uncharacteristically lighter tone. Her younger brother Henry Ward had made an inauspicious entry into the clergy but had recently moved to Indianapolis, where the members of his new congregation were pleased to have a son of Lyman Beecher in their pulpit. Henry Ward, who would later command the attention of the country as a gifted orator, was beginning to come into his own in the Hoosier state.16 In a letter to John dated November 27, 1839, Catharine wrote: “I think in one year my brother Henry will make his influence felt all over the state of Indiana. I have never seen persons improve as fast morally and intellectually as my brother since they commenced the duties of their mission.”17
But there were other, more pressing topics to touch on in the lovers’ letters. Isabella was in Cincinnati in December 1839 and found her family of origin much reduced. She longed, she wrote John back in Hartford, for days that were probably forever gone, when the family was gathered around the table discussing the issues of the day. And then she caught herself: “See how poetical I am growing.”
Poetry had its place, of course, but plighting one’s troth was a serious matter, and Isabella intended to be practical.
5
ISABELLA MARRIES, AND FACES A CONUNDRUM
And here we pause to ponder all the women through all the years who have questioned the role of marriage in society, and wondered if the institution was quite for them.
Can you blame Isabella, really, for hesitating to take that fine Beecher brain into a legal contract — the last one she’d ever sign — that to her was little more than a type of serfdom? The laws and her religion dictated that she demurely bow her head in front of a minister, perhaps make one last wave to her friends, and disappear into the home of her husband.
Isabella reached womanhood at a time when the male sphere — the “impersonal, immoral and uncertain”— had been sharply separated from the female sphere — the “personal, pure, and circumscribed.”1 As workers moved away from farms and into more industrialized pursuits, families began to mimic the Beechers in their frequent moves in search of better opportunities. This often strained or severed ties that once bound extended families, and the resulting isolation placed the responsibility for child-rearing squarely on the shoulders of families of origin — more specifically, on the mothers. More than ever, women were encouraged to forge intense relationships with their children for the betterment of the child — but not necessarily the mother, whose well-being was to take a backseat while she created good male citizens and prepared her daughters to do the same.2
Middle-class women were encouraged to keep mother-diaries by cultural arbiters like John S. C. Abbott, who insisted such journals would help women stay focused, remain aware, and would encourage rigorous review.3 Abbott was a writer and minister, and in his seminal 1835 work, The Mother at Home, he stressed the importance of daily asking oneself questions such as “Have I this day fulfilled all my duties toward God, my Creator, and prayed to Him with fervor and affection?”4
Avoiding
