Isabel Hayes Chapin Barrows, 1845-1913

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No. 5421 Isabel C. Barrows

Isabel wrote a biography of her husband, A Sunny Life. The Biography of Samuel June Barrows. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1913).

In 1863, when she was 18, Isabel accompanied her first husband William Chapin to India where they worked as missionaries in Ahmednuggur. William died there in 1865, leaving her a widow at the age of nineteen. Isabel stayed on and completed her missionary work, returning to the United States six months later.

In Dansville, New York, Isabel worked at a sanatorium where she met her second husband, Samuel June Barrows.

Isabel began to study shorthand in addition to her medical studies while Samuel worked as a stenographer. Soon after the move to New York City, however, they were uprooted and moved to Washington, D.C. after Samuel was offered a job as secretary for the Secretary of State William H. Seward. The next summer Samuel came down with an illness and Isabel filled in for him, making her the first woman to officially work for the State Department.

No. 5417 Samuel June Barrows

While Samuel remained in Washington to continue at his position, she returned to New York City in 1869 and enrolled at the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, receiving her M.D. degree. She then went abroad for the second time to study ophthalmology as a specialty at the University of Vienna, becoming the first woman to enroll at the institution. Once she completed those studies, Isabel returned to Washington, D.C., and became its first woman to open a private medical practice in ophthalmology. While at Washington she also became one of the first woman professors at Howard University’s School of Medicine.

After she completed her education, following an agreement they had made previously, Samuel enrolled at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

No. 5419 The Barrows house was located at 51 Sawyer Avenue.

He became minister of the First Church in Dorchester in 1876 and, in 1880, became the editor of the weekly Christian Register.  Samuel was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1896, and he became interested in penal reform.  Isabel began writing articles and books with her husband about prison reform and the treatment of the feeble-minded. Her membership in the Women’s Committee to Inspect Women’s Institutions, gave her a place of authority in the debate over the prison statement. As a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), she joined NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw and other suffragists in March 1908 to urge the U.S. Senate to move forward with the constitutional amendment for women’s right to vote. Her speech before the Senate’s Committee on Woman Suffrage referenced her recent visit to Finland where women already had the right to vote.[12]

Her activism was not limited to the boundaries of the United States. In 1909 she went to Saint PetersburgRussia, in order to petition for the release of Catherine Breshkovsky, who was being held as a Russian revolutionary. While she was overseas, Samuel died. After briefly returning to New York for the funeral, Isabel returned to Russia to continue pleading for Catherine Breshkovsky’s release. Following this effort abroad she took Samuel’s place at the International Prison Congress in Paris.

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December 24, 2021

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