Julia Ward Howe

Julia Ward Howe (New York, 1819 – Boston, 1910) was an American writer, poet and activist, best known for the lyrics of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and for the 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation. She lived through a period of profound change in the United States, marked by the fight against slavery and the Civil War, and her career matters because she combined literature, social reform and the campaign for women's rights at a time when few women could.

The daughter of a Wall Street banker with strict Calvinist beliefs, she lost her mother, the poet Julia Rush Cutler Ward, when she was a child. Access to a library that challenged the family's religious outlook helped her educate herself in languages and philosophy. In 1843 she married Samuel Gridley Howe, a physician and reformer twenty years her senior whose domineering temperament shaped the marriage. He disapproved of her writing, and she first published her poems anonymously, many of them voicing the frustrations of a married woman. After a separation in 1852 the couple reconciled, though the relationship remained strained.

In 1861, while visiting a Union camp in Virginia, she heard soldiers singing a song about John Brown. Her friend James Freeman Clarke urged her to write new words for the tune, and the result became one of the most popular songs in the Northern cause during the war. After the conflict she turned increasingly to pacifism and women's suffrage, helped found women's associations in New England, edited suffrage publications and, in 1908, became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 1870 she wrote her appeal to the women of the world, the forerunner of Mother's Day, which called on women to unite against war. The idea took time to take hold, and the celebration as we know it owed much to others, Anna Jarvis among them. Her legacy combines literary work with a demanding public life, and the hymn she wrote remains one of the most recognisable pieces in her country's musical history.