Howe, Julia Ward

Howe, Julia Ward,

1819–1910, American author and social reformer, b. New York City. Although unhappily married, she assisted her husband, Samuel Gridley HoweHowe, Samuel Gridley,
1801–76, American reformer and philanthropist, b. Boston, Mass., grad. Brown, 1821, M.D. Harvard, 1824. He began his life-long service to others by going to Greece to aid in its war for independence and spent six years there.
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, in his philanthropic projects and in editing the Boston Commonwealth, an abolitionist paper. Her first book of poetry was published in 1854. After giving birth to her sixth and last child in 1859, she was free to write and lecture in behalf of woman suffrage, African-American emancipation, and other causes, and to help found a world peace organization. In Nov., 1861, after watching Union troops march into battle, she wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," her most famous work. The American Academy of Arts and Letters elected her as its first woman member in 1908. Besides writing several volumes of poetry, she was the author of critical works on Goethe and Schiller, Sex and Education (1874), Modern Society (1881), and a biography of Margaret FullerFuller, Margaret,
1810–50, American writer, lecturer, and public intellectual, b. Cambridgeport (now part of Cambridge), Mass. She was one of the most influential personalities in the American literary circles of her day.
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 (1883). A fragmentary novel of hers was discovered in 1977 and published as The Hermaphrodite (2004).

Bibliography

See her Reminiscences, 1819–1899 (1899); biographies by her daughters L. E. Richards and M. H. Elliott (1915, repr. 1970), V. H. Ziegler (2004), and E. Showalter (2016); L. H. Tharp, Three Saints and a Sinner (1956).

Howe, Julia Ward

(1819–1910) writer, reformer, poet; born in New York City. She was educated privately, married Samuel Gridley Howe (1843), and lived mainly in Boston. A social reformer, she and her husband edited The Commonwealth, an antislavery paper in Boston, and she was a tireless worker, writer, and lecturer for social causes, particularly for the woman-suffrage international peace movements. She also wrote poetry, but is known today for only one poem, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" (1861), which she wrote after visiting Union troops camped outside Washington, D.C.