Isabella Beecher Hooker

“Women are surely ‘people,’ I said.” — Isabella Beecher Hooker (in reference to the phrase “We, The People” in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution)

Born this day in 1822: Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822–1907), suffragist and lobbyist on behalf of women’s rights

Isabella Beecher Hooker was born Isabella Beecher to the Rev. Lyman Beecher family in Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1841 she married lawyer John Hooker. The couple had four children.

The Hookers were the center of Hartford’s literary and social circle. It was under the influence of this elite group that Hooker became convinced of the feminist cause. She worked with leading suffragists of the day to promote women’s rights. She cofounded the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868 and the following year founded the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association (which she led for 36 years), planned and sponsored woman's rights conventions, and supported a married women's property bill that was drafted by her husband. She also lobbied extensively in Washington D.C. for a constitutional suffrage amendment.

“For years and years women have been petitioning Congress and the State Legislatures to take down the political bars which men have put up, contrary to the national constitution and the whole spirit of our government, and allow them to become a active co-workers in promoting the general welfare; but the reply has been "leave to withdraw," or its equivalent; and this simply because these women petitioners had no power to cut off the heads of these Congressmen and Assemblymen; (their political heads, I mean…).” —Isabella Beecher Hooker, “The Constitutional rights of the women of the United States,” an address before the International Council of Women, Washington, D. C., March 30, 1888

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