Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1819 – October 17, 1910) was a prominent American abolitionist, social activist, and poet most famous as the author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
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Born Julia Ward in New York City, she was the fourth of seven children born to Samuel Ward (May 1, 1786 – November 27, 1839) and Julia Rush Cutler. Among her siblings was Samuel Cutler Ward. Her father was a well-to-do banker. Her mother died when she was five. When she was a daughter of William Greene (August 16, 1731 – November 30, 1809), Governor of Rhode Island and his wife Catharine Ray.
Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", set to William Steffe's already-existing music, was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 and quickly became one of the most popular songs of the Union during the American Civil War.
In 1870 Howe was the first to proclaim Mother's Day, with her Mother's Day Proclamation.
After the war Howe focused her activities on the causes of pacifism and women's suffrage. From 1872 to 1879, she assisted Lucy Stone and Henry Brown Blackwell in editing Woman's Journal.
From 1891 to 1909 she was interested in the cause of Russian freedom. Howe supported Russian emigre Stepniak-Kravchinskii and became the member of the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom (SAFRF).
Howe died on October 17, 1910, at her home, Oak Glen, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, at the age of 91.[1] Her death was caused by pneumonia. She is buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
On January 28, 1908, Howe became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Howe was inducted posthumously into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
She was featured on a 15 cent US stamp issued in 1987.
The Julia Ward Howe School of Excellence in Chicago's Austin community is named in her honor.
Her home in Rhode Island, Oak Glen, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
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Julia Ward Howe (27 May 1819 - 17 October 1910) American writer, poet, and social activist.
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JULIA WARD HOWE (1819-1910), American author and reformer, was born in New York City on the 27th of May 1819. Her father, Samuel Ward, was a banker; her mother, Julia Rush [Cutler] (1796-1824), a poet of some ability. When only sixteen years old she had begun to contribute poems to New York periodicals. In 1843 she married Dr Samuel Gridley Howe, with whom she spent the next year in England, France, Germany and Italy. She assisted Dr Howe in editing the Commonwealth in 1851-1853. The results of her study of German philosophy were seen in philosophical essays; in lectures on "Doubt and Belief," "The Duality of Character," &c., delivered in1860-1861in her home in Boston, and later in Washington; and in addresses before the Boston Radical Club and the Concord school of philosophy. Samuel Longfellow, his brother Henry, Wendell Phillips, W. L. Garrison, Charles Sumner, Theodore Parker and James Freeman Clarke were among her friends; she advocated abolition, and preached occasionally from Unitarian pulpits. She was one of the organizers of the American Woman-Suffrage Association and of the Association for the Advancement of Women (1869), and in 1870 became one of the editors of the Woman's Journal, and in 1872 president of the New England Women's Club. In the same year she was a delegate to the Prison Reform Congress in London, and founded there the Woman's Peace Association, one of the many ways in which she expressed her opposition to war. She wrote The World's Own (unsuccessfully played at Wallack's, New York, in 1855, published 1857), and in 1858, for Edwin Booth, Hippolytus, never acted or published. Her lyric poetry, thanks to her temperament, and possibly to her musical training, was her highest literary form: she published Passion Flowers (anonymously, 1854), Words for the Hour (1856), Later Lyrics (1866), and From Sunset Ridge: Poems Old and New (1898); her most popular poem is The Battle Hymn of the Republic, written to the old folk-tune associated with the song of "John Brown's Body," when Mrs Howe was at the front in 1861, and published (Feb. 1862) in the Atlantic Monthly, to which she frequently contributed. She edited Sex and Education (1874), an answer to Education (1873) by Edward Hammond Clarke (1820-1877); and wrote several books of travel, Modern Society (1880) and Is Polite Society Polite ? (1895), collections of addresses, each taking its title from a lecture criticizing the shallowness and falseness of society, the power of money, &c., A Memoir of Dr Samuel G. Howe (1876), Life of Margaret Fuller (1883), in the "Famous Women" series, Sketches of Representative Women of New England (1905) and her own Reminiscences (Boston, 1899). Her children were: Julia Romana Anagnos (1844-1886), who, like her mother, wrote verse and studied philosophy, and who taught in the Perkins Institution, in the charge of which her husband, Michael Anagnos (1837-1906), whose family name had been Anagnostopoulos, succeeded her father; Henry Marion Howe (b. 1848), the eminent metallurgist, and professor in Columbia University; Laura Elizabeth Richards (b. 1850), and Maud Howe Elliott (b. 1855), wife of John Elliott, the painter of a fine ceiling in the Boston library, - both these daughters being contributors to literature. Mrs Howe died on the 17th of October 1910.
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Categories: HOU-HU | US politicians | American poets
   | Biography on Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography site - Julia Ward Howe |
| | Mother's Day Proclamation - www.prism.net |
| | Julia Ward Howe - Julia Ward Howe: Biography from Answers.com |
| | Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) on harvard.edu - Open Collections Program: Women Working: Julia Ward Howe |
| | Poetry - Representative Poetry Online Redirection Page |
| | A profile of her father - WARD, Samuel [1786-1839] -- American banker |
| | Julia Ward Howe.org: A site devoted to the life and work of Julia Ward Howe. - Julia Ward Howe - Home |
| | Julia Ward Howe - Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, Vol. I. |
| | Finding Aid for the Julia Ward Howe Papers - Finding Aid for the Julia Ward Howe Papers, 1891-1898 and undated |
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