Julia Ward was born in
New York City in
1819.
At the age of 21, she married
Samuel Gridley Howe,
Unitarian,director of the Perkins Institute for the
Blind in
Boston, and an
abolitionist. (Samuel was rumored to be one of the
Secret Six that funded
John Brown's raid on
Harper's Ferry). They had
six children,
four of whom survived into
adulthood. According to her
diary, the
marriage was
violent. Samuel both resented and mismanaged the financial
inheritance her
father had left her. She turned to self-education, studying philosophy, and writing poems. Both she and her husband got involved in the
United States Sanitary Commission, working to end
death from
disease in both
POW and
army camps. Nationally famous for the
Battle Hymn of the Republic, after the war she went on the
lecture circuit to make up for her squandered inheritance and to spread the word for her new social causes. She had founded with
Lucy Stone, the
New England's Women's Club, which later became the
American Woman Suffrage Association. She would edit and write for their
Women's Journal for more than 20 years. In 1889 she helped to merge the AWSA with
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony's
National Woman Suffrage Association. The distress of the
Civil War also led her to fight for
world peace. In
1870, she issued a
declaration hoping to unite
mothers across national boundaries to put an end to violence, and she lent her support to freedom for
Russia and
Armenia.
In 1907, she was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received three honorary doctorates degrees. The citation for her LL.D. degree from Smith College said of her career:
"Poet and patriot, lover of letters and learning; advocate for over half a century in print and living speech of great causes of human liberty; sincere friend of all that makes for the elevation and enrichment of women."
When she died in 1910, four thousand people attended her
memorial service.