Julia Ward Howe was born in New York City in 1819 to a wealthy, well-connected family. Her father was a banker, and she grew up surrounded by books and intellectual ambition — though like many women of her time, she had to struggle for the opportunity to express it. She married Samuel Gridley Howe, a reformer and educator known for his work with the blind, which opened doors to Boston's reform circles, though their marriage was personally challenging. Samuel often dismissed her writing goals and exerted control over her ambitions, creating a constant tension between her domestic duties and her desire to make her voice heard.
Howe published poetry and plays starting in the 1850s, but her life took a turn in November 1861. While visiting a Union Army camp near Washington during the Civil War, she heard soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" — a marching tune whose lyrics felt too harsh for their cause. A friend encouraged her to create something better. Rising before dawn the next morning, she quickly penned the verses that became "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The Atlantic Monthly published it in February 1862, paying her four dollars, and the poem spread rapidly through the Union, becoming one of the most recognized works in American history.
“What often gets overlooked in this narrative is everything she accomplished afterward.”
Howe became a dedicated advocate for women's suffrage, co-founding the American Woman Suffrage Association with Lucy Stone in 1869. She edited a suffrage journal, gave lectures regularly, and helped establish women's clubs nationwide. In 1870, appalled by the Franco-Prussian War, she wrote what she termed a Mother's Day Proclamation — a pacifist appeal for women to oppose war. This proclamation had nothing to do with flowers and brunch; it was a political statement that predates the commercial holiday by decades.
In 1908, she became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She passed away in 1910 at the age of ninety-one, having outlived most of her contemporaries and witnessed the suffrage movement she helped nurture come within a decade of achieving its goal. Over the twentieth century, her legacy has often been reduced to that single hymn, but her true body of work — including poetry, travel writing, biography, drama, and many years of public advocacy — reveals a much richer story.
