comparison, sister Harriet bore seven children — including twins — a family size about which Catharine, in a letter to Mary, bemoaned: “Poor thing, she bears up wonderfully well, and I hope will live through this first tug of matrimonial warfare, and then she says she will not have any more children, she knows for certain for one while.”15
Isabella’s letters to John — whose work often required him to travel — and to her family show an increasingly frustrated woman. That she loved her children is unquestioned; that she frequently feared how best to show that love and to rear them into responsible adults, equally so. Though in earlier years fathers were enjoined in sermons to rule their households and look after their children, by the time the Hookers were raising a family, the duties of child-rearing had shifted to the mother.16
Isabella with daughter Mary, 1848–49. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.
If Isabella did not feel up to the task of raising her children, she had at her disposal a variety of mothers’ magazines spawned by local maternal associations intent on encouraging women to embrace their domesticity.17 Catharine, in fact, suggested that women should be forgiven for their mistakes in mothering, as they “have never had the knowledge which they have needed”— information she, never married and never a mother, was happy to dispense.18
How much Isabella relied on outside resources to teach her about mothering isn’t known, but without the example of an involved mother herself, Isabella found herself frequently relying on the idealized version of Mother — and frequently feeling as if she fell short. Her “maternal devotion and vigilance could only have intensified her fear that the world of events, before which she and John had once stood as ostensible equals, was gradually becoming closed to her — not by the fiat of her husband, but by the all-absorbing demands of hearth and home.”19 Her frustration may have manifested itself in an increase in physical complaints throughout the 1840s. In a January 1843 letter, she wrote John that she was considering homeopathy — which in Connecticut was a relatively new form of alternative medicine — for her general malaise.20 She apologized for her “nervous hypochondria” that was sometimes accompanied by unhappy dreams about her mother.21
Isabella with daughter Alice, 1848–50. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.
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