Isabella Beecher Hooker - Early Life

Early Life

Isabella Holmes Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, the second child of Harriet Porter and the Reverend Lyman Beecher. As her father was called to new congregations, Isabella followed him to Boston, and then Cincinnati. In Cincinnati she attended her sister Catherine’s Western Female Institute. Although, the Western Female Institute closed during the Panic of 1837, not long after Isabella’s mother Harriet died. Then, at age fifteen, she then returned to Connecticut for an addition year of schooling at the Hartford Female Seminary, the first school her sister Catherine had founded, but was no longer involved with.

While studying in Hartford, Isabella met John Hooker, a young lawyer from an established Connecticut Family. They married in 1841, and Isabella spent most of the following twenty-five years raising their three children. John brought a reformist attitude to the marriage; just before their marriage, John made his abolitionist sympathies known. Isabella did not immediately approve of her husbands position, but she gradually converted over to the anti-slavery cause. Throughout the 1850s Isabella supported the abolitionist cause, but her primary activity was motherhood. These early tendencies toward domesticity were likely an influence of her sister Catherine’s philosophy. The Hooker family moved to Hartford in 1853 and purchased land with Francis and Elisabeth Gillette, which formed the first homesteads of what would become the Nook Farm Literary Colony.