a biography of the day-isabella beecher hooker (reformer, feminist, suffragist)

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Isabella Beecher Hooker

Dates: February 22, 1822 - January 25, 1907

Occupation: reformer, feminist

Known for: woman suffrage work

Also known as: Isabella Beecher, Isabella Hooker
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Between cases, John Hooker read aloud from the law books of Blackstone, and Isabella was horrified to learn of the lack of legal rights for women. A gift from Anna Dickinson of some writing of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on women's rights, an 1864 meeting with Caroline Severance while nursing wounded in South Carolina, and finally, reading a pre-publication copy of Mill's On the Subjection of Women convinced Isabella to become involved in the woman's rights movement. Through her acquaintance with Caroline Severance, she met Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Paulina Wright Davis and other suffragists.
She soon joined with others in founding the New England Woman Suffrage Association. She took a leading role in planning and sponsoring woman's rights conventions in Connecticut, and supported a married women's property bill introduced into the legislature, drafted by her husband.

When Victoria Woodhull submitted a suffrage petition to Congress, undercutting plans Hooker had made for working towards a federal suffrage amendment, Hooker was prepared to dislike Woodhull. But she heard Woodhull speak, and, impressed, became a supporter.

In fact, she became such a strong supporter that she took Woodhull's side against her own family shortly thereafter. Woodhull published in her weekly newspaper accusations of adultery against Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Isabella's illustrious half-brother, a Congregationalist minister like their father. Isabella accepted the truth of Woodhull's accusation, though Rev. Beecher's church and most of his friends and family did not. The Nook Hill literati ostracized Isabella Hooker over her support for Woodhull and Henry Ward Beecher pronounced her insane. The split never healed; when Henry Ward died 16 years after the accusations were published, his wife barred Isabella from visits and even from the funeral.
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In her seventies, still active, Isabella supported Olympia Brown's efforts to work for suffrage in Presidential elections through Congressional action, rather than support the National Woman Suffrage Association's work for state-by-state suffrage. She served on the Board of Lady Managers at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and served as president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association until 1905.

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http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_hooker_isabella.htm