Beechers for their far-reaching influence in religion, in politics, in issues of the day such as abolition and women’s suffrage.
Think the Kennedys, but bigger, said Valerie.
I do not remember why I was assigned to Isabella, but Valerie began researching the older sister, Catharine, while another colleague, Kathy Megan, began researching Harriet. I felt sorry for them — Valerie, because she was writing about a woman I came to consider vaguely unlikable, and Kathy, because she was writing about someone who’d been written about to death — and quite well, actually. Connecticut’s own Joan D. Hedrick had already written a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harriet in Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life.
It is hard to improve upon a Pulitzer.
I figured I had the best of the three. If I hadn’t heard of Isabella Beecher, surely no one else had either and the possibilities were limitless. There’d be no ancient scholar calling from some dusty library correcting my characterization of this long-dead woman. Yay!
But there was something more. As we made our way — individually and as a group — to Hartford’s Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, I became entranced. Isabella kept showing up with bold-faced suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Why had we lost track of her? Why had history not included her? She lobbied, spoke, and wrote laws, yet all I knew was she was the half-sister of one of the better-known authors of all time.
The people at the Stowe Center were incredibly kind. We were allowed — carefully — to handle family letters, which were the lifeline of the Beecher family. Someone would start a conversation and send it on, and the next sibling would add a few lines, and send it on again. Eventually, the pages were covered with spidery handwriting from some of the smartest people of their time. It was like reading the transcript from an intellectual salon — with a few barbed sibling-digs thrown in.
And oh! What siblings. The family included Harriet Beecher Stowe, who more than any other author brought slavery to the forefront of America’s psyche; Henry Ward Beecher, a minister who was considered, at one point, the most famous man in America; and William, Edward, George, Charles, Thomas, and James — ministers who lacked the world renown of their brother, but who wielded immeasurable influence in their day. Add to them the eldest child, Catharine, who was dedicated to the education of women, and was perhaps the most outspoken of her siblings.
The lone holdout to public life, the private Mary Beecher, immersed herself in her family in Hartford. We know little about her other than through her involvement with her siblings, yet her influence — particularly on Isabella — was acute. Even so, that influence paled in comparison to the sway their father, Lyman, held over his children.
We came to know this family well, and over time — or so we joked — we each began to emulate our subjects. Valerie got bossy, Kathy became the accommodator, and I took on the mantle of the moderately difficult little sister who would not be moved.
There. I did it again. Even that short description doesn’t do Isabella justice. There’s a fine line between “difficult” and “resolute.”
In my research, I came across a few attempts in the 1970s at capturing her life, when feminist historians began to look at figures who’d been pushed to the sidelines. One product of that effort was Anne Throne Margolis and Margaret Granville Mair’s rather remarkable The Isabella Beecher Hooker Project, a 126-page compilation of the woman’s life and correspondence. Much of what was written in that 1979 work forms the backbone of this book. I am deeply in the authors’ debt.
I rather quickly learned that most (male) biographers had long ago dismissed Isabella as something between eccentric and crazy, with slightly more votes for crazy. Joseph S. Van Why, former director of the Stowe-Day Foundation, the precursor of the Stowe Center, wrote in his 1975 book, Nook Farm, that no other resident of this storied Hartford neighborhood lived under such “criticism and censure.” Chalk some of that up to the rules of her day. A woman’s place was in the home, and popular literature tried to romanticize just how keen that could be. Motherhood was wrapped up in lacy lavender ribbons, and here was Isabella furiously untying them — or trying to. Many women might have privately railed against their prescribed roles, but Isabella recorded her dissatisfaction over decades in blunt letters and journals. She wanted a voice, and she wanted an existence separate from her beloved husband, John Hooker, who preceded her into abolitionism and then followed her into the suffrage movement. She felt called by God to be more than a wife and mother, and she struggled with the guilt that this calling engendered. Her half-sister, Catharine, made a career of encouraging women to wrap their arms around their babies (the first anchor babies!) and stay home. They could, wrote the never-married Catharine, rule the world by rocking the cradle.
We may have left the hoopskirts behind, but Catharine’s writing remains the foundation of our Woman Canon, the one we can recite from memory. Catharine’s motivation to push for women’s education was to train women to run a more godly home. Even today, her notion about a woman’s highest calling has its passionate adherents, and its — vocal — opponents.
Count me among the latter. I am on Team Isabella.
Meanwhile, Isabella mingled with the great (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass) and the notorious (Victoria Woodhull), and when the pressure became too much, she slipped off for water cures in New York and Massachusetts. This was common among women of her class, but Isabella freely admitted that her frequent trips away were mostly an escape from household drudgery. Much as she loved her husband and children, she could not contain herself within the expression of that love. The world was too big.
Can I get an amen?
In her era, that big vision was reason enough for public condemnation, but then Isabella sided against her powerful family when her famous preacher brother, Henry Ward Beecher (stop thinking Kennedys and start thinking Billy Graham in Rev. Graham’s heyday), was accused of infidelity. Some of her siblings — older sister, Mary, chief among them — never forgave her that disloyalty to the family. Though it would have been easier to go along with the thunderous voting bloc that was the Beechers, Isabella clung to the truth, as she saw it. Henry had sinned. Henry needed to repent.
Is that crazy? Or is that resolute?
It is a dicey thing, analyzing someone’s mental state from beyond the grave, and I wouldn’t have the credentials to analyze her if she were alive, but consider the facts of Isabella’s life: She lost her mother — who’d mostly been absent because of illness — just as she entered her teens. She watched her older sisters move into public life and suffer both success and condemnation. She also, as the much-shuttled younger sister, saw her siblings’ marriages up close, and came away with a distinct fear of the all-encompassing and sometimes stifling nature of that bond for women of the 1800s. She was hesitant to marry for fear she’d lose herself. In an 1831 letter to her intended, she called herself “tempest-tossed” and offered to end the engagement should either of them have second thoughts. She filled pages with her second thoughts — but then she married John Hooker anyway. She lost an infant son early in her marriage, and later she lost a beloved adult daughter. She talked to spirits and toward the end of her life, she seemed more comfortable talking to the dead than to the living. Her neighbor Mark Twain was a little frightened of and a lot annoyed with her. Word got around, and the editor of her local paper eventually refused to print her letters and articles about suffrage.
And still she soldiered on.
I did not do a wonderful job boiling all that down into a newspaper story, though the series Valerie, Kathy, and I wrote was well received and reprinted for distribution in classrooms around Connecticut. That felt good, but it wasn’t enough, and that felt strange. Ask any journalist. Once you’ve spent time with a topic and
