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For Isabella Beecher Hooker, it was perfectly clear. Women are “people” — and therefore should be allowed to vote.
#OTD in 1888, she hammered the point home again and again: women are people. And when the framers of the U.S. Constitution wrote, “We, the people,” they meant women too. Therefore the voting laws in the US must be changed to include women.
Obvious, right? Wrong.
Because on this day in 1888, Hooker was speaking to the choir — a gathering of likeminded women at the inaugural meeting of the International Council of Women, at Albaugh’s Opera House on Lafayette Square, in Washington DC.
“Can anything be plainer,” she asked her audience, “than that a woman, being a ‘person,’ is a citizen — and being a ‘citizen’ has the citizen’s right to vote?”
“Can anything be plainer than that a woman, being a ‘person,’ is a citizen — and being a ‘citizen’ has the citizen’s right to vote?”
You can read here remarks on “The Constitutional Rights of Women” here, and see the pamphlet in the Library of Congress here.
Hooker was the youngest of 13 children in the illustrious New England Beecher family, which included her famous siblings, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, and women’s education pioneer Catharine Beecher.
But Hooker was laser focused on women’s rights. She petitioned Connecticut legislators and US congressmen. She co-wrote the state’s first property law for women. She traveled around the country, lecturing tirelessly for women’s rights and the woman’s vote.
Unfortunately her legacy has been overshadowed by her distinguished siblings. But her house still stands in Hartford, Connecticut, just down the block from the former home (now museum) of her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, which I visited not so long ago, on a pre-COVID trip.
I made sure to walk down Forest Street to see her house and pay homage.
She was a forceful woman who used her public voice in support of women. On this day, we thank you, Isabella Beecher Hooker.
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