and paying attention to already-published pieces is like dragging an anchor behind a boat.
But there I was, dragging Isabella. Maybe it was my guilt over writing a bland piece about an interesting woman. Maybe there was something else about this early feminist that caught in my net. Maybe it was a little bit of both. Any woman who lives her life in even a semipublic fashion runs the risk of being misunderstood, misrepresented, or cast to the side because no one takes the time to figure her out. As a dedicated chronicler of history in a hurry, I was keenly aware of the vagaries of who gets remembered, and who gets forgotten, and who becomes the butt of history’s jokes.
So I kept coming back to Isabella. I inserted her — inelegantly — into the travel book. I wrote newspaper columns about her. I began to write essays about her — for what or whom, I haven’t a clue. A couple of times, I dreamed about her and — metaphor alert! — she was always shrouded in the foggy distance. Maybe this is what a girl-crush looks like, and lucky me to have chosen a dead woman who could never love me back.
But I kept thinking how hard it is to swim against the tide, and how much harder still to do so in crinoline and pin curls. And yet she did, with her rage and humor intact.
For however much history has ignored her, Isabella Beecher Hooker lived and loved. She worked tirelessly for votes for women. She stood up and spoke up, often at great personal cost.
I am tempted to say she haunted me, but given Isabella’s tendency to embrace spirits that wouldn’t lie fallow, I don’t want to encourage that kind of thing. Then again, I kind of do. “Do you have a feeling for her?” a medium asked, before she agreed to help me try to contact her. Well, yeah. I do.
And so I wrote this book — well, not this book, but one very much like it. The first manuscript I handed in was a rather perfunctory retelling of the facts: “And then in 1863, the family …,” that sort of thing. It was a fine book, and a thick book, a book packed with footnotes, but it was not the right book. With the blessing of my editor, Suzanna Tamminen (thanks, Suzanna!), I tore back into it. I do not know if anyone else will ever take a stab at Isabella. I only know I had this one shot, and if I wrote a boring book, I’d deserve a visit from the grave from an angry shade who was never, ever boring.
I still don’t know if I’ve done justice to Isabella. I only know I tried.
For all the time I’ve spent with her journals, her speeches, and her letters, Isabella seems to me to be the closest thing we have to a modern woman. With her worries about juggling home-time and me-time and work-time, she would have fit in well today. Though society was telling her to settle for less, she wanted it all, and she wanted it all at once. She was prickly and difficult to like sometimes, but in the time I have spent plumbing her depths, I have been confused sometimes, and frustrated at others, but I have never been bored. I do not expect anyone to search through my own letters and journals, but if they do, my fondest wish is that they’d be every bit as delighted as I have been with Isabella.
About the use of first names: the Beechers were fond of naming their children after one another. There is an abundance of Lymans and Thomases and Harriets and several derivations of Isabella. When appropriate, I refer to them by their first names — and, if necessary for identification, their middle or last names. Some of the letters contain misspellings, or abbreviations. As much as possible, I have retained the original spellings, and I haven’t inserted a note when something is misspelled. I am in no way Isabella’s editor. I wouldn’t want to tell her — even a long-dead her — a thing about how to get her point across. Misspellings and abbreviations aside, I prefer to let Isabella Beecher Hooker speak for herself.
In addition to the encouragement and editing I got from Suzanna, I could not have written this without the support of Joan D. Hedrick, and Debby Applegate, who wrote The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, the Pulitzer Prize winner for biography in 2007. It is a daunting thing to have two Pulitzer-winning biographies at your elbow as you make your own attempt at pinning down a Beecher. Early on, Joan offered to meet and chat and listen to my fumbling attempts to contain a life within a book. When I contacted her about Isabella, Debby (I’d never met her, but I hounded her electronically, so I felt I’d earned the right to call her by her first name) said she had a few notes she hadn’t used in her book about Henry Ward Beecher, and then she sent me some two hundred pages’ worth. And then, when I lost those notes, she sent them again, and apologized for not having placed them in chronological order. Sisterhood is not dead. It’s alive and well and living among Pulitzer-winning authors who have a lot on their plate but cheerfully offered to help me pick through mine.
I must thank, as well, Katherine Kane, executive director of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, who was supportive and encouraging from the first moment — and Elizabeth Burgess, collections manager/goddess of research, who managed to say precisely the right thing every time I wandered in, dazed but convinced I would never be able to do this woman justice, no matter how many pages I wrote. And of course, thank you to Valerie and Kathy. Valerie, if you hadn’t had the idea in the first place, I’d have never met Isabella, and then what would my obsession have been?
Thank you, as well, to my husband, Frank Schiavone, who has endured years of Isabella-inspired non sequiturs. We’d be walking around a village and come across a house marked by a dated commemorative plaque (a common thing in New England), and I’d volunteer that that, 1853, was the same year the Hookers finished their Hartford mansion. I have worked Isabella into conversations about stir-fry, tire balancing, and trees. Perhaps you can imagine the restraint it takes to politely listen to years of this. Frank finally suggested I write a book in the hopes that I’d stop talking about Isabella already. That has not turned out to be the case, but I appreciate the encouragement, and appreciate even more having found my very own John Hooker — patient, steadfast, and fiery in his convictions, all at once.
And finally — and I admit this is odd — I want to thank Isabella herself. As difficult as it is for women to defy cultural norms today, it was harder then. A woman who said “No, thank you” to bone corsets that made teeny-tiny waists to inhabit teeny-tiny lives could lose everything.
Yet Isabella did it anyway, and even when it was clear the world could not quite catch up with her on this side of the grave, she never stopped pushing. How can you not love a woman like that?
THE FABULOUS BEECHERS
THE CHILDREN OF JOHN HOOKER AND ISABELLA BEECHER HOOKER
Created by the author with substantial input from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut
Tempest-Tossed
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THE WORLD THAT AWAITED BELLE
Understanding Isabella Beecher Hooker means first understanding her family — the large, dynamic New England Beecher clan. Isabella was born in 1822, the first child of her father’s second wife, with eight older half-siblings to welcome her. Her father was the noted early American minister Lyman Beecher, and her siblings included a world-famous author, a world-famous minister, and an internationally recognized advocate for women’s education. “Lyman Beecher,” wrote one biographer, “gave us queens as well as kings among men.”1
Certainly he held an unparalleled position of authority in early-1800s America. From a 1904 biography: “Perhaps no one during the
