Isabel Baumann was born on July 28, 1906, and was raised in the Town of Dunkirk, Dane County, Wisconsin, near Hanerville. Her maternal grandparents and parents had migrated from Norway and her father's parents from England to settle in a predominantly Norwegian rural community. After completing secondary school and a one-year teachers' training course at Stoughton High School, she accepted a position teaching at the one-room Oak Lawn School in the Town of Sun Prairie, also in Dane County. In 1928, she married Daniel McCarthy, whom she had met at an Oak Lawn box social and resigned her teaching position to work on the farm operated by her husband, his brother Russell, and their father. Widowed in 1942 after a fatal truck accident, she returned to teaching before moving to Madison in 1945 to work as a laboratory technician with the Dane County Dairy Herd Improvement Association. Among her co-workers was August Baumann, whom she married in 1947. They returned in 1950 to the “McCarthy Farm” (in 1945 rented out) where they resumed farming while participating in neighborhood, township, county, and statewide activities. August Baumann at the time of the interview had been Town of Sun Prairie clerk for many years.
Soon after moving to the farm in 1928, Isabel Baumann joined the Pierceville Mothers' Club, a social group begun in 1924 to provide an important means of support for the school. She was active in the Dane County Rural Federation in the 1920s and 1930s, joined and was elected treasurer of the newly-formed Dane County Farm Bureau Federation women's organization in 1934. Winner of a Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation speaking contest in 1939, she represented the state at the annual convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation. In 1937, Dane County agricultural extension agent J. W. Clark had invited Isabel Baumann and four other women to initiate a regular broadcast called We Say What We Think Club, a monthly program that extended for twenty years over a Madison radio station.
Continuously active among Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation women since 1934, Isabel Baumann in 1959 was elected to chair the WFBF state women's committee. When the composition of the board was changed to allow a seat for representatives of both women's and young farmers' committees, she automatically became a member of the organization's board of directors, the first woman to hold a seat since the early-1930s, when Mabel Douglas of Green County served on the board. Despite her retirement from the board in 1967 after a half-dozen years of helping to stimulate change in WFBF's organizational structure, Isabel Baumann at the time of the interview remained an informed, active member of the organization. Her contributions to the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation personified a shift in the role of women; their involvement, to paraphrase Mrs. Baumann, went far beyond such functions as preparing post-meeting lunches for the men.
