Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
77 Forest Street
Hartford, CT 06105
860-522-9258
info@stowecenter.org
HARTFORD, CT – The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center will host Dr. Ruha Benjamin for our annual Stowe Prize Celebrations on Thursday, September 21 and Friday, September 22. The program on Thursday, September 21 is the Big Tent Celebration – where media partners are welcome to join us for a photo opportunity with Dr. Benjamin from 5:15 – 6:15 pm, as she mingles with guests under the Big Tent and in the Katharine Seymour Day House.
HARTFORD, CT – The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is pleased to announce the final installment of our community work on Harriet’s Backyard with KNOX. Thanks to our lead Garden Volunteer and Stowe Center Board member, Leora Berns, the bed for the new pollinator garden has been prepared and is ready to be planted.
HARTFORD (CT) – The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center was delighted to receive a $24,390 Love Your Block grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving working in partnership with the City of Hartford. This initiative awards nonprofit organizations that seek to contribute to the beautification of Hartford neighborhoods with projects that are grounded in resident interest and engagement.
HARTFORD (CT) – The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center announces the groundbreaking of a flagship urban greenspace—the only one of its kind in the Asylum Hill neighborhood. This refurbished space will be ecologically diverse and environmentally sound. It will offer neighbors, tourists, visitors, and staff an outdoor space to gather, relax, play, and reflect. Signage and interactives will also offer opportunities for all to learn about the historic Nook Farm neighborhood and the contemporary landscape.
Hartford, CT – Beginning in April, the Stowe Center offers their latest four part monthly Salon virtually that explores difficult and necessary conversations around strong topics.
HARTFORD, CT – The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center invites everyone to walk through history with our new neighborhood walking tour, Seeing Is Revealing: Nook Farm Then and Now. Alongside the guide-led walking tours, visitors can also purchase a self-guided walking tour.
Hartford (CT)—The 2023 Stowe Prize is awarded to Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, for her book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want
Hartford (CT)— The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center introduces a virtual Social Justice Reading Circle dedicated to the top five nominees for the annual Stowe Prize award.
Hartford (CT) — The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center shares for the first-time new research on Katharine S. Day, the museum’s founding preservationist and the great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The program seeks to better understand Day’s identity in context of gender and female sexuality in the early 20th-century, how it might have informed her activism as a preservationist and promoter of women’s rights, and in concert with other historic sites engaged in similar interpretive work.
Hartford (CT)—The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center presents its 2023 Sewing & Learning Workshop. The History and Contemporary Craftivist Use of Sentiment Sewing includes lively talks, a dynamic “sewing circle” with discussion and hands-on crafting, and the materials needed to try your skills as a craftivist, or craft activist. The cost is $55 per person for Zoom access to the talks and a hands-on sewing circle activity, as well as a supply kit, which will be mailed in advance of the workshop.
Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker (1822-1907)
An ardent member of the woman’s suffrage movement, Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker joined in the cause along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Isabella was the first child of Lyman Beecher and his second wife, Harriet Porter Beecher.
Isabella began her education at Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary and lived with her sister Mary Perkins. In 1841 she married John Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford. John Hooker was a lawyer and an abolitionist.
In the early 1860s Isabella got involved in the woman’s suffrage movement. Isabella joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as a member of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1869. She was a founding member of the Connecticut Woman’s Suffrage Association. Isabella’s ideas of equality were influenced by John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty and the Subjection of Women.
In 1871, Isabella organized the annual convention of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in Washington D.C. and presented her argument before the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. Her husband, John Hooker, believed in his wife and supported her activities. He helped Isabella draft a bill to the Connecticut Legislature giving married women the same property rights as their husbands. The bill passed in 1877. Isabella annually submitted a bill granting women the right to vote, but it did not pass in her lifetime.