Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/613

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order. Isabella Beecher inherited her personal beauty from her mother and her great individuality came to her from her father. She married John Hooker, of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1841, and he was a descendant in the sixth generation of Thomas Hooker who founded the city of Hartford. He was a man of note in his day, a famous theologian, earnest patriot and an enlightened statesman. Mrs. Hooker kept pace intellectually with her husband, accompanying him in his theological researches and speculations, learning from him much of his profession and making a study of the phases and evolution of the law that governed the United States. She thus became an earnest and profound student of social, political, and religious questions, and when she adopted the idea that women should be allowed to vote as a fundamental right she at once, in characteristic style, began to do all she could to bring about the great reform. She considered women's suffrage the greatest movement in the world's history, claiming that the ballot would give women every social and intellectual, as well as political, advantage. She wrote and lectured, and studied and explained the doctrine of equal suffrage for women for thirty years. She was at the front of this and other reform movements, going cheerfully through the ridicule and abuse that fell to the lot of earnest agitators and reformers. During several seasons she held a series of afternoon talks in Boston, New York and Washington, and at these assemblages she discussed political economy and other topics. When well along in life she published a book entitled "Womanhood—Its Sanctities and Fidelities," which treated of the marriage relation and of the education of children to lives of purity in a courageous yet delicate way. It attracted wide attention and brought to her many earnest expressions of gratitude from intelligent mothers. For many years she held the office of vice-president for Connecticut, in the National Women's Suffrage Association, and in