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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 a fourth, Mary, who was staunchly private), nor did I know Harriet was from a family once known as the Fabulous 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 the story is published, by necessity you move on. There are countless other topics that need your attention, 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?