Howe, Julia Ward

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Julia Ward Howe
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Female
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    6
    Family
    Samuel Ward, Jr. (father), Julia Rush (mother), Samuel Gridley Howe (husband, 1843)
    Occupation
    Writer or Artist
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Other Affiliations
    Women’s Rights

    Julia Ward Howe (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    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.
    Sandra F. VanBurkleo and Mary Jo Miles, "Howe, Julia Ward," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00348.html.
    Chicago Style Entry Link
    Clifford, Deborah Pickman. Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory: A Biography of Julia Ward Howe. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. view record
    Grant, Mary H. Private Woman, Public Person: An Account of the Life of Julia Ward Howe from 1819 to 1868. Brooklyn: Carlson Pub., 1994. view record
    How to Cite This Page: "Howe, Julia Ward," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/index.php/node/23154.