Salons at Stowe: Abolition and Suffrage During Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Lifetime

Salons at Stowe

Salons at Stowe Series

Abolition and Suffrage During Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Lifetime

October 2, 2023

The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is pleased to host Godfrey Simmons, Artistic Director of the HartBeat Ensemble, for a Salons at Stowe program. The HartBeat Ensemble is a Hartford-based theater ensemble and Stowe Center neighbor made up of artist-activists dedicated to creating inclusive spaces within the performing arts. Their work engages with social justice, history, the human experience, and embodies the values of literary activism.

Their upcoming production, Possessing Harriet, grapples with the history of enslavement and raises questions around the culpability of white Northerners who supported enslavement through their inaction; the tensions between white women’s rights activists and abolitionists; the limitations of empathy between races; and other aspects of this troubling, yet true, history. Moderated by Versatile Poetiq, 2022 Artist of Color Accelerator Resident and current Museum Guide of the Stowe Center along with Simmons and Leslie Gabel-Brett will discuss the many themes the work raises, followed by an audience Q & A.

Leslie Gabel-Brett is a playwright, poet, and activist for LGBTQ and women’s rights. She recently retired following a decade as Director of Education and Public Affairs at Lambda Legal and, before that, as Executive Director of the CT Commission on the Status of Women. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology and teaches a course on social activism at Wesleyan University. Gabel-Brett has published poems in Calyx, Passager, Clackamas Literary Review, The Seattle Literary Review where she won the Bentley Prize for poetry in 2002.

Light refreshments will be available.

Event is free but donations are appreciated.

Event capacity is limited to 35 participants.

SALONS AT STOWE PARTICIPANTS WILL RECEIVE A SPECIAL $5 OFF CODE FOR POSSESSING HARRIET TICKETS

Possessing Harriet

Carriage House Theater

360 Farmington Ave, Hartford

In 1839, Harriet Powell, a young, mixed-race, enslaved woman slips away from a hotel in Syracuse, New York, and escapes, finding temporary safe harbor in the home of impassioned abolitionist Gerrit Smith. With the slave catchers in pursuit, Harriet spends the hours before her nighttime escape to Canada in the company of Smith’s young cousin Elizabeth Cady, an outspoken advocate for women’s equality. As both women confront new and difficult ideas about race, identity, and equality, Harriet is forced to the precipice of a radical reckoning with the heartrending cost of freedom. Which wrenching choice will Harriet choose: Return to the relative safety of her master’s household, or risk everything by fleeing to Canada?

Location Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Katharine S. Day House

Doors Open 6:15 pm

Program 6:30 - 7:30 pm

School Group Interest Form

School Group Interest Form 2023

Thank you so much for your interest in a group tour at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center! Please help us schedule your visit by answering the questions below.

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Isabella Beecher Hooker

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.