Stowe and Henson Together

Dr. Clint Smith suggests that the best way to read Harriet Beecher Stowe and Josiah Henson is together.

Dr. Clint Smith, who won the Stowe Prize for literary activism last year with How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, wrote in The Atlantic this month about “The Man Who Became Uncle Tom.” That man was Josiah Henson, whose memoir was often published as The Real Story of Uncle Tom. One edition included a forward by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Dr. Smith was astounded that he had never before heard of Josiah Henson. “Why didn’t I read [Henson’s narrative] in school?” he asked.

Dr. Smith also reported that he read Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the first time very recently. He found a book filled with stereotypes, yes. “But there are also parts of the book that . . . presented the moral complexity of slavery in ways that perhaps no other writer was doing . . . at the time.”

He found that Tom was not the embodiment of the racial slur Uncle Tom, but instead “was kind, thoughtful, and brave—a tragic hero who sacrifices his own life rather than give up information about where two enslaved Black women are hiding. This was not the Tom I thought I knew.” Dr. Smith adds: “Stowe was genuinely trying to do something really important.”

Dr. Smith concludes that read together Henson and Stowe illuminate many of the complexities of human beings negotiating systems of oppression and trying to be good people, trying to do the right thing. Noting where the books are different, where they are the same, why one was more popular than the other, he wrote, “could be really generative.”

Please stay tuned as the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center continues to work together with the Josiah Henson Museum and Park in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Josiah Henson African-Canadian Museum in Dresden, Ontario.

Karen Fisk, who was the director of marketing and communications at Springfield Museums, talks Monday, Dec. 17, 2018 about “At the Noon Hour”, a painting by Isabel Bishop that is part of “Isabel Bishop’s Working Women: Defying Convention” in D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts at Springfield Museums.

Karen Fisk is the Executive Director of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. The Stowe Center’s mission is to encourage social justice and literary activism by exploring the legacy of Harriet Beecher Stowe. We strive to encourage the activist in everyone.

School Group Interest Form

School Group Interest Form 2024

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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.