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Julia Ward Howe

New York, 1819 - 1910, Portsmouth, Rhode Island

BiographyNote: The biography below incorrectly states that Howe died in Oak Glen, Massachusetts. She died in Portsmouth, Rhode Island in her country home, which was called Oak Glen.

Howe, Julia Ward (27 May 1819-17 Oct. 1910), poet, author, and woman suffrage leader, was born in New York City, the daughter of Samuel Ward, Jr., a Wall Street stockbroker, and Julia Rush, a poet. Julia was five when her mother died of tuberculosis. She was educated both by tutors at home and at schools for young ladies until the age of sixteen. Her father died in 1839. Visiting Boston in 1841, she met Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, head of the Perkins Institute for the Blind; in 1843 they married, despite an eighteen-year age difference. Julia gave birth to the first of six children eleven months later while honeymooning in Europe; she bore her last child in 1859 at the age of forty.

In South Boston Howe cared for her household and children while her husband participated in prison reform, school reform, education for the "feeble-minded," Greek and Armenian foreign relief, and abolitionism. Unhappy in her new surroundings and prohibited by her husband from participating in public reform work, she attended lectures, privately studied foreign languages, religion, and philosophy, and wrote poetry and drama. Her husband's resistance to her growing public life and reputation, and his resentment of her income-generating inheritance, led to difficulties in their marriage. In 1850 she spent a year in Rome with her children while Samuel Howe remained in Boston. In 1854 and again in 1857 she contemplated divorce.

Although she had published essays on Goethe, Schiller, and Lamartine in the New York Review and Theological Review before her marriage, Julia Ward Howe's literary career began in earnest in Rome. She wrote her first collection of poems, Passion-Flowers, in 1850; it was published anonymously four years later. Her second anonymous collection, Words for the Hour, appeared in 1857. Both contained allusions to her stultifying marriage, a subject she also wrote about in plays, Leonora; or, The World's Own and Hippolytus. Although the latter was not published until 1941, the former, a story about a woman whose lover abandons her and prompts her suicide, was performed for one week in 1857 before it succumbed to hostile New York reviews. Among her other literary endeavors were an 1860 book, A Trip to Cuba, describing an 1859 vacation, and several letters on Newport high society published in the New York Tribune in 1860.

By far Howe's most famous work, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," was published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. She wrote the poem in 1861 while in Washington, D.C., with her husband, who was helping distribute supplies to Massachusetts regiments. Set to the music of "John Brown's Body," her poem became the rallying song for the North during the final year of the Civil War.

The "Battle Hymn" also brought Howe the fame required to more actively pursue a writing career. In 1867 she produced eleven issues of a literary magazine, Northern Lights. That same year she wrote about her European travels in From the Oak to the Olive (1868). In 1870 she founded the weekly Woman's Journal, a successful, widely-read suffragist magazine to which she contributed for twenty years. She edited a defense of coeducation titled Sex and Education in 1874 and brought out a collection of her own addresses, Modern Society, in 1880. She published a biography of Margaret Fuller in 1883, and another collection of lectures, Is Polite Society Polite?, in 1895. Her popular memoirs, Reminiscences, appeared in 1899. Indeed, Howe continued to write lectures, poems, and articles until her death.

By 1868, when Howe's husband no longer opposed her involvement in public life, she seized the opportunity to become active in reform after years of relative isolation. That year she helped found the New England Women's Club and the New England Woman Suffrage Association; she served as president of the latter for nine years beginning in 1868. In 1869 she became co-leader (with Lucy Stone) of the American Woman Suffrage Association, one of two national suffrage organizations to appear in the wake of a Civil War-related schism in the women's movement. In 1870 she began a seven-year term as president of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association and almost lifelong service as president of the New England Women's Club. That same year she wrote "Appeal to Womanhood throughout the World," an attempt to rally a women's peace movement in response to the Franco-Prussian War. Two years later she organized a poorly-attended Woman's Peace Congress in London.

In January 1876, when her husband died, Howe's public involvement expanded rapidly. She immediately embarked upon her first speaking tour to advance a national women's club movement; she addressed women's groups throughout the Midwest and helped found clubs such as the Wisconsin Women's Club. She then embarked on a two-year tour of Europe and the Middle East.

The whirlwind continued into the 1880s. In 1881 Howe was elected president of an organization she founded eight years earlier, the Association for the Advancement of Women, a group dedicated to improving educational and professional opportunities for women. She became director of the Woman's Department of the New Orleans Cotton Exposition in 1884. Four years later she embarked on a speaking tour of the Pacific Coast and founded the Century Club of San Francisco. In 1890 she helped found the General Federation of Women's Clubs as a means of reaffirming the Christian values of frugality and moderation. From 1891 to 1893 she again served as president of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, and from 1893 until her death once more presided over the New England Woman Suffrage Association. From 1893 to 1898 she directed the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and she also headed the Massachusetts Federation of Women's Clubs, founded in 1893.

Although her best-known contribution to American history was providing the lyrics for the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," a song that contended for the national anthem until 1931, Julia Ward Howe's most substantial contribution lay in women's rights. When she died in Oak Glen, Massachusetts, at the age of ninety-one, she was the acting president and guiding light of the New England Woman Suffrage Association. She founded and presided over numerous organizations dedicated to improving opportunities for women in education, politics, and the professions. She single-handedly laid foundations for woman's rights groups while asserting her own right to participate in public life against formidable opposition, both at home and in the broader community.

Howe's written response to Francis Parkman's analysis of "The Woman Question" in 1879 reveals much about her belief in the need for advances in women's rights. Writing that suffrage was the only way women's interests would be represented at the polls, she explained that sex is certainly an important agent in human affairs, but not the most important. Its influence is easily exaggerated and lost. Men and women may have too much sexuality as well as too little. Society, if impoverished by the insufficiency of this quality, is also degraded by its excess. In men or in women sex is a power only when it is made subservient to reason, when thought and duty common to both sexes are brought forward and dwelt upon, uplifting both alike to self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice. ("The Other Side of the Woman Question," North American Review 272 [Sept. 1987]: 36)

Bibliography
Howe's memoirs, essays, lectures, and letters can be found in the Julia Ward Howe collections at the Library of Congress and at the Houghton Library of Harvard University. Florence Howe Hall, Julia Ward Howe and the Woman Suffrage Movement (1913), contains selections of Howe's speeches and essays. Howe's published works not mentioned above include At Sunset (1910), From Sunset Ridge: Poems Old and New (1898), and Later Lyrics (1866). A book-length biography is Mary H. Grant, Private Woman, Public Person: An Account of the Life of Julia Ward Howe from 1819 to 1868 (1994). Valuable for its insights into Howe's writing of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" is a brief article by Debbie Williams Ream, "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," American History Illustrated 27 (Jan.-Feb. 1993): 60-64. Other informative works are Deborah Pickman Clifford, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (1979); Louise Tharp, Three Saints and a Sinner (1956); and Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (2 vols., 1915). An obituary is in the New York Times, 18 Oct. 1910.

Sandra F. VanBurkleo
Mary Jo Miles

Source:
Sandra F. VanBurkleo
Mary Jo Miles. "Howe, Julia Ward";
http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00348.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Mon Jul 29 2013 15:16:57 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

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Last Updated8/7/24

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