“I would be human, and American, and a woman.”

—Julia Ward Howe (1819 – 1910)

To people seeking her autograph, she would give a pencilled slip of paper with a few lines of verse or a saying.

By the time she died, she was the most famous woman in America. Four thousand people filled Boston’s Symphony Hall at her memorial service and sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She had written the lyrics during the Civil War. It became the anthem of the Union and brought her lasting fame, and today she is remembered mainly as its author. Few know the extent of her creativity and visionary politics, exemplified by the fact that – herself the mother of six children – she invented Mothers’ Day as an international call for peace, making a passionate appeal to women around the world to join together in opposing the wars promulgated by men.

Julia Ward Howe led a life of prodigious activism. Today we would probably call her a human rights activist. She was known as an abolitionist and a suffragist, and she was a charismatic public speaker at a time when women were vilified for speaking out. She became the leader or president of many political, social and philanthropic organizations. She was a preacher too, at her own Unitarian church and others, and she founded an organization for women ministers. She founded the New England Woman’s Club and other women’s clubs wherever she went around the country. And for decades, she worked for women’s voting rights: writing, speaking, campaigning and organizing. 

With her friend Lucy Stone, she founded the American Woman Suffrage Association, breaking away from the national suffrage organization because it opposed the 15th Amendment. On the 100th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, they organized a Woman’s Tea Party at Faneuil Hall in Boston where 3,000 people gathered to protest that American women had had 100 years of taxation without representation.  

She wrote all her life, eventually becoming the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She wrote poetry, plays, speeches, essays, biographies – and an extraordinary unfinished novel (c. 1840s) about the struggles of an intersex hero. At first she published anonymously and later under her name, despite her husband’s ferocious opposition. The name Julia Ward Howe represented an unusual insistence on her own identity and family tree; she was a descendant of Samuel Ward, one of the Founding Fathers who helped to write the Declaration of Independence. 

Trained in her youth as a singer, she loved to perform at parties, singing, playing the piano, and inventing songs. Her joie de vivre seemed inexhaustible: she loved social life, the theatre, eating and drinking. In the memoir she wrote late in life, she declared her ambition in these words: “I would be human, and American, and a woman.”