Isabella Beecher Hooker

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This picture is of Isabella Beecher Hooker founder of the Connecticut Women Suffrage Association in 1869.

Isabella Beecher Hooker was born in Litchfield, Connecticut in 1822. She had many siblings, including her half-sisters Catharine Beecher, an education reformist, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Isabella married John Hooker, who was a descendant of Thomas Hooker, founder of Hartford, Connecticut. While waiting for her husband at his law office, Isabella begun to read William Blackstone, a London judge, which helped generate her interest in women’s rights. One passage in Blackstone's text states “a married women and man were as one person under the law. Thus, marriage actually suspended a woman’s legal standing and, in the eyes of the law, a wife had no rights independent of her husband.” Isabella found that to be shocking and motivating. She used it to help draw more women into the women’s suffrage movement.

In 1869, Isabella founded the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association. The CWSA submitted bills and testified at legislative hearings demanding equal rights and made its members’ commitment to suffrage known by organizing national demonstrations. Throughout this fight, Isabella had begun to interact with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were fighting on a national level. Isabella also paid for a suffrage convention in Washington, D.C. “for the purpose of calling the attention of Congress to the fact that women were already citizens of the United States under the Constitution, interpreted by the Declaration of Independence, and only needed recognition from that body to become voters" (cwhf.org).  On a more state level, she fought for a married woman’s property bill, which was held in Legislature for seven years until it passed in 1877. The bill would give married women the same property rights as their husbands.  Isabella submitted a bill to grant women the right to vote; however, she died before she could witness it being passed.