Julia Ward Howe

Julia Ward Howe ( HOW; May 27, 1819 – October 17, 1910) was an American author and poet, known for writing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as new lyrics to the song "John Brown's Body," and the original 1870 pacifist Mothers' Day Proclamation. She was also an advocate for abolitionism and a social activist, particularly for women's suffrage.

Early life and education

Julia Ward was born in New York City on May 27, 1819. She was the fourth of seven children. Her father Samuel Ward III was a Wall Street stockbroker, banker, and strict Calvinist Episcopalian. Her mother was the poet Julia Rush Cutler Ward, related to Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox" of the American Revolution. She died during childbirth when Howe was five.

Howe was educated by private tutors and schools for young ladies until she was sixteen. Her eldest brother, Samuel Cutler Ward, traveled in Europe and brought home a private library. She had access to these books, many contradicting the Calvinistic view. Though social, she became well-read, as well as scholarly. She met, because of her father's status as a successful banker, Charles Dickens, Charles Sumner, and Margaret Fuller.

Her brother, Sam, married into the Astor family, allowing him great social freedom that he shared with his sister. The siblings were cast into mourning with the death of their father in 1839, the death of their brother, Henry, and the deaths of Samuel's wife, Emily, and their newborn child.

Personal life

Though raised an Episcopalian, Julia became a Unitarian by 1841. In Boston, Ward met Samuel Gridley Howe, a physician and reformer who had founded the Perkins School for the Blind. Howe had courted her, but he had shown an interest in her sister Louisa. In 1843, they married despite their eighteen-year age difference. She gave birth to their first child while honeymooning in Europe. She bore their last child in December 1859 at the age of forty. They had six children: Julia Romana Howe (1844–1886), Florence Marion Howe (1845–1922), Henry Marion Howe (1848–1922), Laura Elizabeth Howe (1850–1943), Maud Howe (1855–1948), and Samuel Gridley Howe Jr. (1859–1863). Howe was an aunt of novelist Francis Marion Crawford. Ward’s marriage to Howe was troublesome for her. He did not approve of her writing and did everything he could to disrupt her creative efforts.

Howe raised her children in South Boston, while her husband pursued his advocacy work. She hid her unhappiness with their marriage, earning the nickname "the family champagne" from her children. She made frequent visits to Gardiner, Maine, where she stayed at "The Yellow House," a home built originally in 1814 and later home to her daughter Laura.

Howe was a vegetarian in the late 1830s but was eating meat again by 1843. In 1852, the Howes bought a "country home" with 4.7 acres of land in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, which they called "Oak Glen." They continued to maintain homes in Boston and Newport, but spent several months each year at Oak Glen.

Career

Writing

She attended lectures, studied foreign languages, and wrote plays and dramas. Prior to her marriage, Howe had published essays on Goethe, Schiller and Lamartine in the New York Review and Theological Review. Her first volume of poetry, Passion-Flowers was published anonymously in 1853. The book collected personal poems and was written without the knowledge of her husband, who was then editing the Free Soil newspaper The Commonwealth. Her second anonymous collection, Words for the Hour, appeared in 1857. She went on to write plays such as Leonora, The World's Own, and Hippolytus. These works all contained allusions to her stultifying marriage.

Unpublished during her lifetime but certainly part of her twenty-first century legacy is a fragmentary novel, The Hermaphrodite, assembled from manuscript fragments in Harvard's Houghton Library by Gary Williams and published in 2004 by the University of Nebraska Press.

She went on trips including several for missions. In 1860, she published A Trip to Cuba, which told of her 1859 trip. It had generated outrage from William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist, for its derogatory view of Black people. Howe believed it was right to free the slaves but did not believe in racial equality. Several letters on High Newport society were published in the New York Tribune in 1860, as well.

Howe being a published author troubled her husband greatly, especially because her poems often critiqued women's roles as wives, her own marriage, and women's place in society. Their marriage problems escalated to the point where they separated in 1852. Samuel, when he became her husband, had also taken complete control of her estate income. After her husband's death in 1876, she found that most of her money had been lost in his bad investments.

Howe's writing and social activism were greatly shaped by her upbringing and married life. Much study has gone into her difficult marriage and how it influenced her work as a writer and an activist.

Politics

In the early 1870s, Howe was nominated by Massachusetts governor William Claflin as justice of the peace. However, there were uncertainties surrounding her appointment, as many believed women were not fit to hold office. In 1871, the Massachusetts Supreme Court made the decision that women could not hold any judicial offices without explicit authorization from the legislature, thereby nullifying Howe's appointment to justice of the peace. This led to activists petitioning for legislation allowing women to hold office, separate from legislating women's suffrage. Women's supporters believed that petitioning for officeholding before petitioning for a women's suffrage amendment would expedite women's involvement in politics.