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Preface: Why a book about Isabella Beecher Hooker?
- Wesleyan University Press
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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 Healdsometimeback.Curiositieswasabookabouttheinterestingandweird 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 fortheirfar-reachinginfluenceinreligion,inpolitics,inissuesofthedaysuch as abolition and women’s suffrage. Think the Kennedys, but bigger, said Valerie. viii Preface 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, becauseshewaswritingaboutsomeonewho ’dbeenwrittenabouttodeath—and quitewell,actually.Connecticut’sownJoanD.Hedrickhadalreadywrittena PulitzerPrize–winningbiographyofHarrietinHarrietBeecherStowe:ALife. 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! Buttherewassomethingmore.Aswemadeourway — individuallyandas 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 nextsiblingwouldaddafewlines,andsenditonagain.Eventually,thepages were covered with spidery handwriting from some of the smartest people of theirtime.Itwaslike readingthe transcript fromanintellectualsalon — 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 [44.197.238.222] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:54 GMT) Preface ix 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.Ididitagain.Eventhatshortdescriptiondoesn’tdoIsabellajustice. There’s a fine line between “difficult” and...