Happy birthday, Isabella

She'd be 200 today, but still...

(This one, you can read.)

On this day in 1822, Isabella Beecher Hooker was born and entered the Fabulous Beecher clan, a group known for their headline-grabbing (or maybe that was just Henry Ward) proclamations, their committed abolitionism (but only up to a point), their razor-sharp wit that seemed to have been a big part of all the siblings.

Every Beecher — save for Mary, who was judiciously private — lived life on or near the public stage. The group included well-known ministers (back when that meant something); a well-down educational reformer/lifestyle guru (back when that wasn’t a thing), and, of course, there was Harriet Beecher Stowe, Isabella’s older half-sister.

I wrote a biography of Isabella after stumbling across her on an assignment while working at Mother Courant. The short piece I wrote for the newspaper didn’t feel like it did her justice, so I kept digging until poof! A book!

(The book felt like it didn’t do her justice, either, but I tried.)

(Note to self: Most authors don’t admit that kind of thing out loud. Work on that, please.)

Isabella was a take-no-prisoners suffragist, a big-hearted abolitionist who — unlike so many of her race and age — believed in the complete enfranchisement of people who’d been enslaved. In other words, she was against slavery, but she was also against treating people who’d been held in slavery as anything less than human beings. She saw them as colleagues, in other words.

That stance made her an outlier. People in northern parlors were expected to wring their hands over the damnable institution, but for most of them, that’s where their activism stopped. The better-off families continued to reap the benefits of an economy built on slavery, while they sent some of their wealth to support anti-slavery efforts.

Not Isabella, who grew up a poor (but influential) minister’s daughter. She further pushed herself to the edge of acceptable behavior by being a card-carrying spiritualist. Here, too, people could dabble (Mary Todd Lincoln dabbled) but polite company didn’t go whole-hog. In every way imaginable, Isabella went whole-hog, and I admire her greatly for that.

The lessons I took from studying her life, which included being dismissed and shunned by a goodly number of her family, was that you cannot worry about what others think of you, and if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll sleep peacefully.

So here’s to all the other women kicked to the curb by history because they were too loud, too well-spoken, too committed to their idea of equality to care if they were popular. I admire them all greatly.