Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell
A few states had what were known as “women’s separate property acts,” or laws that allowed women to keep control over any property they brought into a marriage. Connecticut was not one of them. Defenders of Blackstone’s principles argued that “‘oneness’ was the core principle of happy marriage and virtuous public order.”10 Allowing women to own property would, went the argument, be the death of marriages everywhere.
Isabella’s earlier concerns about how she would exist in a traditional marriage resurfaced with a vengeance. The suspension of her “very being or legal existence” had been, precisely, her fear. If she no longer “existed”— except under the wing of her beloved husband — then she no longer existed. As great as her love for John Hooker might have been, suspension of herself was something she could not countenance. The couple discussed the phenomenon exhaustively until, wrote Isabella, “the subject was dropped as a hopeless mystery.”11
But it didn’t go away. The fear only sank below the surface while Isabella, attentive to the early instructions of sister Catharine, focused on her home life.
The next year, on September 30, the Hookers welcomed their first child, a boy they named Thomas, but he died of unknown causes before his first birthday.12 It was a bitter blow to them both. Isabella’s response was to turn her attention even more slavishly to her household, and, following the advice of John S. C. Abbott, she began a series of detailed journals that recorded what can only be called the most mundane of household tidbits — the choice of curtains in the bedrooms, the china setting, the subsequent children’s latest sayings — from the month the second child was born until shortly after the youngest child’s birth, a span of about ten years. Her motivation may have been partly grief, and partly older sister Catharine’s influence, whose writing about the “cult of domesticity” was felt particularly acutely by her younger sister.13 The pain of losing her first son moved Isabella to focus on what she perhaps thought she could control, even while that focus removed her from the broader world, the one she had glimpsed at her father’s table and during the early days of her marriage. Those hours once spent reading the law and discussing literature were now given over to running a well-to-do household and rearing children. The Hookers would have three after Thomas — Mary, born in 1845, Alice, born in 1847, and Edward (Ned), born a long — by the standards of the day — eight years later, in 1855. This span and their relatively small family of three children suggest that Isabella and John took some responsibility for controlling family size.14
By comparison, sister Harriet bore seven children — including twins — a family size about which Catharine, in a letter to Mary, bemoaned: “Poor thing, she bears up wonderfully well, and I hope will live through this first tug of matrimonial warfare, and then she says she will not have any more children, she knows for certain for one while.”15
Isabella’s letters to John — whose work often required him to travel — and to her family show an increasingly frustrated woman. That she loved her children is unquestioned; that she frequently feared how best to show that love and to rear them into responsible adults, equally so. Though in earlier years fathers were enjoined in sermons to rule their households and look after their children, by the time the Hookers were raising a family, the duties of child-rearing had shifted to the mother.16
Isabella with daughter Mary, 1848–49. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.
If Isabella did not feel up to the task of raising her children, she had at her disposal a variety of mothers’ magazines spawned by local maternal associations intent on encouraging women to embrace their domesticity.17 Catharine, in fact, suggested that women should be forgiven for their mistakes in mothering, as they “have never had the knowledge which they have needed”— information she, never married and never a mother, was happy to dispense.18
How much Isabella relied on outside resources to teach her about mothering isn’t known, but without the example of an involved mother herself, Isabella found herself frequently relying on the idealized version of Mother — and frequently feeling as if she fell short. Her “maternal devotion and vigilance could only have intensified her fear that the world of events, before which she and John had once stood as ostensible equals, was gradually becoming closed to her — not by the fiat of her husband, but by the all-absorbing demands of hearth and home.”19 Her frustration may have manifested itself in an increase in physical complaints throughout the 1840s. In a January 1843 letter, she wrote John that she was considering homeopathy — which in Connecticut was a relatively new form of alternative medicine — for her general malaise.20 She apologized for her “nervous hypochondria” that was sometimes accompanied by unhappy dreams about her mother.21
Isabella with daughter Alice, 1848–50. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.
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