Isabella Beecher was born on February 22, 1822 in
Litchfield, CT. She was one of 13 children of religious leader Lyman Beecher. While attending Hartford Female Seminary she met and later married lawyer and abolitionist John Hooker.
After the Civil War she joined the women's suffrage movement by writing "A Mother's Letter to a Daughter on Women Suffrage", in which she argued that women suffrage would the moral level of government. After attending the women's rights conventions in New York and Boston, she became a founder the New England Women Suffrage Association.
In 1870 she began to go on lecture tours around the United Stated advocating for women's right to vote. By 1887, Isabella expanded her message and advocated for women to have greater roles in society and in the criminal justice system.
Isabella Beecher Hooker died in Hartford, CT on January 25, 1907 at aged 84.