Tempest-Tossed
Isabella, circa 1896–1906. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.
Susan Campbell
Tempest-Tossed
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
Genealogies
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
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
Preface
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
