We’re pleased to announce that Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker, by Susan Campbell, was recently reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement (September 5, 2014) About the book: Tempest-Tossed is the first full biography of the passionate, fascinating youngest daughter of the “Fabulous Beecher” family—one of America’s most high-powered families of the nineteenth century. Older sister Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Brother Henry Ward Beecher was one of America’s most influential ministers, and sister Catherine Beecher wrote pivotal works on women’s rights and educational reform. And then there was Isabella Beecher Hooker—“a curiously modern nineteenth-century figure.” She was a leader in the suffrage movement, and a mover and shaker in Hartford’s storied Nook Farm neighborhood and salon. But there is more to the story—to Isabella’s character—than that.

 

Read the review here, courtesy of The Times Literary Supplement:

In 1903, a young female suffragist wrote to Isabella Beecher Hooker, lamenting the effacement of Hooker’s contributions to the women’s suffrage movement. “I am not forgotten”, Hooker defensively responds. Susan Campbell’s new biography, like the remainder of Hooker’s letter, records even as it seeks to rectify the ironies of this statement. “To this day it has never been suggested that my name should appear with Mrs. Stanton’s [Elizabeth Cady Stanton] and Miss Anthony’s [Susan B. Anthony]”, Hooker writes, naming those who remain inseparable from the struggle for women’s rights. While Campbell’s biography may not rewrite history in the manner that her subject would have wanted, it captures the personal and public tensions that kept Hooker in the shadows.

Even now, Campbell notes, it is easiest to introduce Hooker in terms of her relatives and associations: the younger half-sister of the author Harriet Beecher Stowe and minister Henry Ward Beecher, and the close friend and confidant of Anthony and Stanton. Compared to these more recognizable public figures, Hooker was a late bloomer. She married the lawyer John Hooker in 1841 and spent the next two decades focused on domestic concerns. This time, however, would set the foundation for her future politics. Unlike radical suffragists such as Victoria Woodhull, who espoused free love and divorce reform, Hooker took a moderate stance: a woman’s place was in the home, but that “trained her for the bigger world” and encouraged in her an “ability to lead”. Hooker thus became a go-between for moderates and radicals.

Not only do Hooker’s individual desires mirror the larger goals of female suffragists – the craving for a public voice; the desire to be a mother, wife and respected intellectual and politician – but her peripheral status gets at what likely hindered the movement itself. “It is funny, how, everywhere I go – I have to run on the credit of my relations”, Hooker once complained. In its early days, women’s suffrage, too, was subordinated to other causes: abolition, most significantly, but controversial religious movements such as Spiritualism as well. Such associations were not always beneficial. The pathos recorded in Susan Campbell’s work isn’t just Hooker’s effacement, but the fact that in spite of their years of struggle, Hooker, Stanton and Anthony all died well before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment – the very law that would have granted Hooker that “particle of individuality” she craved.

Emily Hodgson Anderson

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This review was first published in The Times Literary Supplement on September 5, 2014. It is reprinted with the permission of The Times Literary Supplement and the author of the review, Emily Hodgson Anderson. Emily Hodgson Anderson is associate professor at the University of Southern California, and author of  Eighteenth-Century Authorship and the Play of Fiction: Novels and the Theater, Haywood to Austen.