Born into a world of privilege in early-19th-century Manhattan, Julia Ward Howe had ambitions that soared far beyond her ultimate fame as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A petite, red-headed young woman, she stepped off the conservative path her father had prepared for her when, in 1843, at age 24, she married Samuel Gridley Howe, 18 years her senior. Stunningly handsome, Howe had set off for Greece in 1824 to join Lord Byron in support of the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Arriving just after Bryon died, Howe provided vital assistance to the Greek cause as a surgeon, military commander and aide to refugees. He returned to Boston in 1831 bearing medals for his service and Byron’s helmet as a relic of the poet and a symbol of European romanticism. As founding director of the Perkins School for the Blind, Howe pioneered a system of communicating with blind and deaf children who had been unreachable and considered idiots.
In an era when common illnesses left children both blind and deaf, Howe’s work redeemed hundreds if not thousands of lives.
By 1841, when Julia and Howe met, he was well on his way to being one of the great humanitarians of the 19th century. They were immediately drawn to each other, and after their marriage, they became a liberal power couple admired on both sides of the Atlantic.
Basking in her husband’s glory did not satisfy Julia. She wanted more – and that is what makes her interesting to Elaine Showalter, one of the founders of feminist literary theory. Julia aspired to literary greatness. Yet, despite her social privilege, she was thwarted at every turn. What did not break her made her stronger, and she eventually triumphed, though not in the way she expected. In this very readable biography, Showalter portrays Julia as an exemplar of the emerging American female writer of the 19th century.
The Howe marriage was not a happy one. Beneath his glamour, Howe was an earnest man, an ascetic and given to radical politics. His work among the refugees in Greece was arduous, traumatic and full of personal privation. His success with the blind and deaf involved mind-numbing drudgery. Julia had little sympathy for his self-sacrifice, seeing it as his neglect of her. For his part, Howe did not support her literary ambitions and her hunger for experience, regarding those desires as signs of her narcissism.
As portrayed by Showalter, Julia fully lives up to her childhood nickname, Diva: She flashes her temper, displays a high opinion of herself, and loathes housekeeping, childbearing and child-rearing.
All the while Julia hungered for literary recognition, which came to her in 1853 with the publication of her book of poems, “Passion-flowers.” Skillful, powerful and new, the poems spoke in an authentic female voice, evoking the raw search for fulfillment and the hardship of an emotionally bankrupt marriage, and hinting at finding love elsewhere. She had broken all the rules, and the book became a cause celebre.
Howe learned of “Passion-flowers” only after its publication. Humiliated and betrayed, he reacted badly, and the marriage further deteriorated. Throwing himself into the abolitionist movement, Howe became one of the Secret Six who conspired with John Brown to launch the attack on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 that augured the Civil War. Julia threw herself into her writing, producing more poetry, a few plays and returning to an unfinished novel with a hermaphroditic protagonist that she never published.
Julia’s lasting fame did not arise from these literary endeavors. In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, she accompanied her husband to Washington. Struck by the reality of war, she woke from a dream and wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.” It was adopted almost immediately by the Union Army, and after the war, it was sung even by Southerners. It remains today our “singable anthem.”
Showalter explains that the song’s greatness lies in the combination of its subject matter – Julia had abandoned the gender wars for a matter of national crisis – and her new language: “Instead of the ungainly feminine rhymes of her passion poems, ending in a weak syllable, her lines end in a forceful final rhyme.” This was the way forward for women’s literature and for the second half of Julia’s life.
After Howe died in 1876, Julia blossomed. Surviving for more than 30 years, she shifted her focus from artistic expression to reform. She plunged into the public sphere, which had begun to welcome women in the peace movement, the temperance cause and the campaign for the vote. There was a healthy market for ladies’ magazines, a considerable trade in books on women’s subjects, and a lecture circuit with female audiences and female speakers. Until her death in 1911, Julia Ward Howe traveled widely to lecture, published several books and served as president of many women’s organizations.
A century later, her poems, plays and lectures are of mostly scholarly interest. But the “Battle Hymn” shows no sign of fading from the public eye. As Julia once declared: “I would be human, and American and a woman.” And as such, she found the immortality she craved.