Isabel Baumann was born on July 28,1906, and was raised in the Town of Dunkirk, Dane County, Wisconsin. After completing a one-year teachers' training course, she taught at a one-room school in the Town of Sun Prairie. In 1928, she married Daniel McCarthy and resigned her teaching position to work on her husband's family farm near Sun Prairie. A truck accident left her a widow in 1942, and in 1947, she married August Baumann.
Isabel Baumann was a strong advocate of rural women's organizations and of women's involvement and representation in rural organizations in general. Soon after moving to the farm in 1928, she joined the Pierceville Mothers' Club, a social group begun in 1924 to provide support for the school. She was active in the Dane County Rural Federation in the 1920's and 1930's, and joined and was elected treasurer of the newly-formed Dane County Farm Bureau Federation women's organization in 1934. In 1937, Dane County agricultural extension agent J. W. Clark invited Isabel Baumann and four other women to initiate a regular broadcast called the “We Say What We Think Club,” a monthly program that continued for twenty years over a Madison radio station. From approximately 1961 to 1967, she served on the board of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation.
