Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell

Читать онлайн книгу.

Tempest-Tossed - Susan Campbell


Скачать книгу

      

       Tempest-Tossed

image

      Isabella, circa 1896–1906. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.

      Susan Campbell

image

       Tempest-Tossed

image

      THE SPIRIT OF

      ISABELLA BEECHER HOOKER

      Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut

      Wesleyan University Press

      Middletown CT 06459

      www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 2014 Susan Campbell All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Fanwood

      Wesleyan University Press is a member

      of the Green Press Initiative. The paper

      used in this book meets their minimum

      requirement for recycled paper.

      Library of Congress

      Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Campbell, Susan, 1959–

      Tempest-tossed : The spirit of Isabella

      Beecher Hooker / Susan Campbell.

       pages cm.—(Garnet books)

      Includes bibliographical references

      and index.

      ISBN 978-0-8195-7340-7

      (cloth: alk. paper)—

      ISBN 978-0-8195-7388-9 (ebook)

      1. Hooker, Isabella Beecher, 1822–1907.

      2. Feminists—United States—Biography.

      3. Women social reformers—United

      States—Biography. I. Title.

      HQ1413.H65C36 2013

      305.42092—dc23

      [B] 2013028419

      5 4 3 2 1

      Cover illustration: Isabella Beecher Hooker, c. 1872, courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.

      CONTENTS

       Preface vii

       Genealogies

       The Fabulous Beechers xiv

       Children of Isabella Beecher and John Hooker xv

       1. The World That Awaited Belle 1

       2. Training to Be a Beecher 13

       3. The Education of Isabella Beecher 20

       4. Isabella in Love 30

       5. Isabella Marries, and Faces a Conundrum 38

       6. Motherhood, and Confusion 58

       7. Abolition, and an Awakening 79

       8. A Woman’s Worth, a Brother’s Shame 106

       9. A Spiritual Digression 141

       10. In the Thick of It 145

       11. The Elusive Ballot 155

       12. The End, and a Legacy 166

       Notes 181

       Index 209

      Preface image

      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 —


Скачать книгу