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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Julia Ward Howe HOWE, Julia Ward (1819–1910). An American poet, philanthropist, and sociological writer, active in the agitation for the legal and political rights of women. She was born in New York, of wealthy parents, and married, in 1843, Dr. S. G. Howe, a philanthropist, best known for his labors for the education of the blind. With him she edited the Boston Commonwealth, an antislavery journal, lecturing also on social subjects and preaching occasionally in Unitarian pulpits. After the war she became a noted advocate of woman suffrage and of prison and other reforms. She was the only woman ever elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her early publications, Passion Flowers (1854), Words for the Hour (1856), and Later Lyrics (1866), were in verse, the best known of her pieces being the stirring "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which was written in 1861. She wrote also two dramas. The World's Own (acted in 1855) and Hyppolytus (1858). The more significant of her later works are: Sex and Education (1874); Modern Society (1880); a Life of Margaret Fuller (1883); a valuable autobiographical Reminiscences, 1819–99 (1899); and Sketches of Representative Women of New England (1905). Florence Howe Hall, Mrs. Howe's daughter, edited a selection from her mother's speeches and essays, Julia Ward Howe and the Woman Suffrage Movement (1913). Her verse is collected in From Sunset Ridge, Poems New and Old (1898). Consult L. E. Richards, Two Noble Lives (Boston, 1911). The New International Encyclopaedia, |