April 16, 2014 7 PM
Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker
Author Talk, Q & A, Book Signing and Party
Note NEW LOCATION for this event: Carriage House Theater (home of HartBeat Ensemble), 360 Farmington Avenue -- just across the street from the Stowe Center. We'll enjoy the book talk and Q & A at the Carriage House, then move to the Stowe Center's Katharine Seymour Day House for the book signing and party.
Parking is available:
On-street on Forest or Woodland Streets
Stowe Center parking lot at 77 Forest Street
Mark Twain House upper lot (adjacent to 77 Forest Street)
Lot at 66 Forest Street
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center presents
Women of Spirit: Susan Campbell & Isabella Beecher Hooker, to celebrate the release of Campbell’s biography:
Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker (Wesleyan University Press, 2014).
The free event includes remarks by Campbell, Q&A with Stowe Center Executive Director Katherine Kane, book signing, refreshments, live music and a display of rarely seen items from the Stowe Center collections including Hooker’s suffragist cap, clothing and letters.
Tempest-Tossed is the first full biography of the passionate, fascinating youngest daughter of the “Fabulous Beecher” family – one of the most high-powered American families of the nineteenth century. Older sister Harriet was the celebrated author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, brother Henry Ward Beecher was one of America’s most influential ministers, and sister Catharine Beecher wrote pivotal works on women’s rights and educational reform.
Isabella Beecher Hooker, a curiously modern 19th-century figure, was a leader in the suffrage movement and a mover and shaker in Hartford’s storied Nook Farm neighborhood. An ardent Spiritualist, Hooker could be off-putting, perplexing, tenacious and charming. In the eyes of Hartford society, which valued restraint and duty, her “wild streak” was especially unfavorable.
“Susan Campbell has brought Isabella’s fascinating forgotten story back to life with the deep research of a born historian and the vibrant readable prose style of a veteran journalist.” -- Debby Applegate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher.
Join us as Campbell brings to life Hooker’s evolution from orthodox Calvinist daughter, wife and mother to one of the most influential players in the movement for women’s suffrage. Enjoy refreshments and live music as we toast Campbell and Beecher Hooker, women of spirit.
Campbell conducted much of her research on Isabella Beecher Hooker at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, which houses the largest collection of material related to the Beecher and Stowe extended families. “I first met Isabella Beecher Hooker while researching an article about her at the Stowe Center, and once I met her, I couldn't let her go,” says Campbell. “She was impassioned and dedicated and she has a lot to teach us.”
Campbell’s new book is available for sale in the Stowe Center Museum Store. Copies will also be available for purchase at the event.
Campbell is the award-winning author of "Dating Jesus." For more than a quarter-century, she was a columnist at the
Hartford Courant, where her work was recognized by the National Women's Political Caucus, New England Associated Press News Executives, the Society for Professional Journalists, the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and the Sunday Magazine Editors Association. Her column about the shootings at lottery headquarters in March 1998 was part of The Courant's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage. She has appeared on CBS' "Sunday Morning," the BBC's "World Have Your Say," and various radio shows including WNPR. She also co-writes a religion blog, "Hot Dogma!"
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro...and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
