Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell

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       Tempest-Tossed

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      Isabella, circa 1896–1906. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.

      Susan Campbell

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       Tempest-Tossed

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      THE SPIRIT OF

      ISABELLA BEECHER HOOKER

      Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut

      Wesleyan University Press

      Middletown CT 06459

      www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 2014 Susan Campbell All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Fanwood

      Wesleyan University Press is a member

      of the Green Press Initiative. The paper

      used in this book meets their minimum

      requirement for recycled paper.

      Library of Congress

      Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Campbell, Susan, 1959–

      Tempest-tossed : The spirit of Isabella

      Beecher Hooker / Susan Campbell.

       pages cm.—(Garnet books)

      Includes bibliographical references

      and index.

      ISBN 978-0-8195-7340-7

      (cloth: alk. paper)—

      ISBN 978-0-8195-7388-9 (ebook)

      1. Hooker, Isabella Beecher, 1822–1907.

      2. Feminists—United States—Biography.

      3. Women social reformers—United

      States—Biography. I. Title.

      HQ1413.H65C36 2013

      305.42092—dc23

      [B] 2013028419

      5 4 3 2 1

      Cover illustration: Isabella Beecher Hooker, c. 1872, courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.

      CONTENTS

       Preface vii

       Genealogies

       The Fabulous Beechers xiv

       Children of Isabella Beecher and John Hooker xv

       1. The World That Awaited Belle 1

       2. Training to Be a Beecher 13

       3. The Education of Isabella Beecher 20

       4. Isabella in Love 30

       5. Isabella Marries, and Faces a Conundrum 38

       6. Motherhood, and Confusion 58

       7. Abolition, and an Awakening 79

       8. A Woman’s Worth, a Brother’s Shame 106

       9. A Spiritual Digression 141

       10. In the Thick of It 145

       11. The Elusive Ballot 155

       12. The End, and a Legacy 166

       Notes 181

       Index 209

      Preface image

      WHY A BOOK ABOUT ISABELLA BEECHER HOOKER?

      There it is, on page 57 of Connecticut Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff, a book I cowrote with my friend Bill Heald some time back. Curiosities was a book about the interesting and weird things in Connecticut — a state not known for its frivolity — and that thin volume contained a short entry on Isabella Beecher Hooker, a complicated Hartford woman, written by me. In three snarky paragraphs, I called her “the more eccentric sister of author Harriet Beecher Stowe.” I dismissed decades of hard work in a parenthetical phrase: “Isabella, a suffragist, was also a spiritualist”— because Spiritualism is a grabber, and “suffragist” is not.

      It is not my best work.

      Like most every American child, I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I learned that Harriet Beecher Stowe opposed slavery, and that mid-1850s English is really hard to read. Beyond that, I knew nothing — not how disappointed some abolitionists were when Harriet pulled her punches and promoted colonization of freed slaves, not of Harriet’s illustrious family, not anything about her life and times other than that women wore hoopskirts and curls and the wealthier ones had fainting couches.

      I may have made up the fainting couches, but still.

      And then a little more than ten years ago, Valerie Finholm, a former colleague at the Hartford Courant, suggested three of us journalists explore Harriet and two of her sisters, Catharine and Isabella. I did not know Harriet even had sisters (there was

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