In a patriarchal society in which girls and women are carefully and subtly convinced to rank themselves as men's inferiors, feminism often arrives as a conversion experience. At what age the flash of understanding happens and by what means varies greatly, but the jolt it gives to living is unmistakably the same. The landscape of one's life is transformed.

For Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), famous as the author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," the jolt came late. She entered marriage committed to traditional views about women's place and had six children--four more than she wished because she felt a duty to serve her husband's pleasure. But her husband's obsession with controlling her and his determination to restrict her life to home and family weighed upon her. A gifted writer, Howe left letters and essays and, eventually, speeches and books, that fully document her difficult journey from the dark side of patriarchy to the self-affirming side of womanhood.

The marriage began like a fairy tale. In 1843, Julia Ward, a petite, 23-year-old budding poet from a wealthy New York City family married the dashing, lanky 41-year-old medical doctor and social reformer, Samuel "Chev" Gridley Howe. They were deeply in love. Julia was beautiful, vivacious, brilliant, a gifted stager, and the center of attention at any party; Chev was handsome, heroic (he had fought in the Greek Revolution and received a medal of honor from the Greek government), and deeply committed to his work as head of Boston's famous Perkins Institute for the Blind. Also an advocate for education and prison reform, he would soon become a leading abolitionist. In retrospect, Julia probably "married the man she wished to become" (as we used to say in the '70s)--someone with a deep engagement in social justice issues.

At the time of her marriage she understood the rules--that she was to have no life or identity outside that of wife and mother. She wrote of her husband, "I am perfectly satisfied to sacrifice to one so noble and earnest the daydreams of my youth." She intended to meet Chev's demands for absolute obedience. In a poem written during her first year of marriage, she observes hopefully:

When once I know my sphere,
Life shall no more be drear,
I will be all thou wilt;
To cross try least desire shall be guilt. (p. 34)

But she never succeeded in "knowing her sphere." In the years that followed, Julia was lonely, restless, and unhappy in the restricted domesticity of her marriage; she was also frequently disobedient and felt deeply the guilt she had predicted she would feel. Chev's coldness and temper tantrums made her situation particularly painful.

Two things saved her. One was her writing. Unable to establish intimacy with the devoted but emotionally distant Chev, and lacking female friends, she recorded her misery and perplexity in her diary, her letters to her sister, and her poems. The other was her intellect. A voracious reader since childhood, she turned to books for comfort. She searched the pages of philosophers Comte, Hegel, and Kant and explored her faith for answers. Initially, she thought her need for something more was due to her creative imagination, which she believed set her apart from most women. Initially, her faith was in her gifts, not her gender.

Thus, her first rebellions against Chev's authority were literary. She secretly and anonymously published her first book of poems, Passion-Flowers, in 1853 and endured Chev's fury when its author was discovered. Two plays (published under her own name) soon followed. Then in 1861 she wrote a poem that could be sung to the Civil War tune, "John Brown's Body." When it was published in the Atlantic Monthly in early 1862, the North gained a powerful hymn to the righteousness of the war and a new woman to admire. Suddenly famous, she began to form ties outside her home. She joined the Ladies Social Club and the Boston Radical Club and began to lecture on philosophical and religious questions, although Chev forbade her to do so. She started a literary magazine. She became a cofounder of the New England Woman's Club and, in the wake of African Americans gaining the vote, a tentative supporter of women's suffrage.

Still, as she tells the story, she did not believe in women's full equality until one day in November 1868, when she attended the organizing meeting of the New England Woman Suffrage Association and listened for the first rime to a women's rights speech by the brilliant orator Lucy Stone. Howe carefully recorded her conversion at age 49 in her autobiography. "During the first two-thirds of my life, I looked to the masculine ideal of character as the only true one ... In an unexpected hour a new light came to me, showing me ... the new domain ... of the true womanhood." Stone's whole-hearted vision of woman as man's equal partner in intellect and politics became her own. As she would write in an 1893 speech reproduced in Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism (1997), "To all [that] society expects of women, let them add the enlightened mind [and] the liberal and resolute will."

Within the year, Howe had become a major player in the women's rights movement. She cofounded the American Woman Suffrage Association and the Woman's Journal with Lucy Stone in 1869. In the years that followed she published Sex and Education, a collection of essays intended to rebut the damaging theory of Dr. E. H. Clarke that the higher education of women harms her reproductive capacities; served as president of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association for many years and as president of the New England Woman's Club for decades; lectured on women's issues across the country; published a biography of Margaret Fuller; and served on the committee that successfully reconciled the two branches of the women's suffrage movement in 1890. While she remained in her marriage, she continued to rebel against Chev's strictures, now with a clear conscience. Her persistent courage in the face of his determined, angry efforts to control her is remarkable. It was only just before his death in 1876 that they were emotionally reconciled.

Howe's story--both of her struggles in her marriage and her evolution and contributions as a social reformer--should be more widely known. Aside from her autobiography, Reminiscences (1899), and her three daughters' Pulitzer-prize winning biography of her, Julia Ward Howe (1915), there have been only two biographies until now, both by historians: Deborah Pickman Clifford's Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Biography of Julia Ward Howe (1978) and Mary Grant's Private Woman, Public Person: An Account of the Lift of Julia Ward Howe from 1819 to 1868 (1994), both of which are out of print. The first deals with her feminism and her conversion in a soothing way, as if it were all part of life in Boston in the mid-19th century. The second is the more profound exploration and wrestles at length with Howe's changing ideas about women and the intellectual and emotional journey that preceded her conversion.

Now we have Valarie H. Ziegler's Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward How. Ziegler, who is professor of religious studies at DePauw University, is the first biographer to consult the extensive papers of Howe's daughter, Laura E. Richards. These have provided her with a new window into the private life of the Howe family, particularly from the children's points of view. Ziegler therefore focuses her book on Julia's frustrations in her marriage and her experiences as a mother, and on the four Howe daughters, both as figures in the story and, for three of them, as shapers of their mother's reputation after her death. Her intention is to portray "the heady process by which Julia Ward Howe's search for autonomy and respectability produced a literary tradition that established her as an American icon." In her view, the daughters, aided by Howe, whose autobiography is silent about the misery of her marriage, were determined to make Julia into an "eminent public figure," even if it required active suppression of the painful realities of their not-always-happy family life.

Ziegler organizes her book into five very long chapters. Although sequenced chronologically, internally they are ordered, with the exception of Chapter 1, around themes. Each chapter, after opening with a brief narrative about important events for the selected time period, consists of sections on Howe's marriage, children, literary efforts, and ideas about women. While this structure keeps these themes before the reader, narrative flow suffers under its weight, with the result that the story of Howe's transformation (in Ziegler's terms, her struggle for autonomy), the central story of her remarkable life, disappears as a story, even if information related to it appears on every page.

The great strength of the book is Ziegler's portrait of the marriage, or rather Howe's experience of it. This is detailed and compelling. The author quotes repeatedly from Howe's diaries, letters, and poems to convey Chev's efforts to control his wife and her suffering under his domination. When he punished her various acts of disobedience early in the marriage by refusing to speak to her for days, Julia's ability to write poetry disappeared for a time. "My voice is still frozen to silence" she wrote her sister, "my poetry chained down by an icy bond of indifference, I begin to believe that I am no poet, and never was, save in my own imagination." Julia's struggles with self-doubt and her later self-assertions are vividly portrayed.

Unique among Howe's biographers, Ziegler has a particular interest in Howe as a writer of poetry, plays, and fiction. Although she decides against providing a "systematic examination" of these works, perhaps because it has already been done by Gary Williams in Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (1999), Howe's imaginative writings loom far larger in Ziegler's treatment than any of Howe's reform work. Most intriguing is an untitled, unfinished novel written in the 1840s and early 1850s, which Ziegler refers to as "the Laurence novel," after its main character. The theme is gender ambiguity; stunningly, the work anticipates Virginia Woolf's Orlando by almost eighty years. In the story, Howe, in Ziegler's words, "dismantled the ideology of separate spheres, offering in its place the gendered fluidity of the hermaphrodite Laurence and the transfigured lovers [his/her friends and almost-lovers], Eva and Rafael." Ziegler explores the implications of the novel's ideas for Howe's early struggles not only to find something redeeming about how she suffered in her marriage but also to sort through her confusion about gender roles and her desire to somehow escape the restricted ones that were her cultural heritage. (Consideration of Williams' insights on the novel are restricted to endnotes; his new analysis of it, The Hermaphrodite, Or, the Laurence Manuscript [2004], was published too late for such consideration in Ziegler's book but is included in the bibliography.)

Ziegler is also interested in Howe's early philosophical lectures about women's place, arguing that in them Howe "laid the groundwork for her future career as a women's rights activist." Unfortunately, Howe's later, more feminist speeches, particularly those given after Chev's death, are not given the same close analysis. Nor does Ziegier attempt to examine the factors outside of personal experience that shaped Howe's thinking. The ideas of Margaret Fuller and Lucy Stone, to name only two of the women intellectuals who were major influences on Howe, are not discussed.

Perhaps the biggest challenge Ziegler faced was how to deal with Howe's extensive and wide-ranging social reform career, which began in the late 1860s and continued through the early 1890s. This is virtually unexplored territory, since only one biographer, Deborah Clifford, has addressed it, and Clifford was writing in 1978, when much of the work by historians on women's social reform history had yet to be undertaken. Ziegler faced the opposite problem--a wealth of historical studies. Perhaps her cursory treatment was the wisest course to follow, given her great interest in the family dynamics and her desire to write a short book (the text, excluding endnotes, comes to a mere 168 pages). Still, in a work aiming to trace Howe's search for autonomy, a deeper examination could have been justified.

Julia Ward Howe was a complex, multifaceted person to whom no single biographer can do full justice. Judging from clues in other biographies of her (although not Ziegler's), a whole study could be done of Howe's religious thought. Her roles in the women's suffrage movement and the women's club movement are other studies yet to be written. I first encountered Howe as a child, when I read a children's biography, Jean Brown Wagoner's marvelous Julia Ward Howe: Girl of Old New York (1945; now out of print). It was the first biography about a woman I ever read, and the memory of it has stayed with me all these years. At the time, I loved her imaginative, independent spirit and her devodon to books and writing. Now, I am drawn to her dogged determination to work through the puzzles and pain in her life, to take her ideas and the world seriously, and to accept responsibility for aligning, and re-aligning, her life and her beliefs. Ziegler's work brings the passionate, determined Howe once again vividly before us and for that we can be grateful.

Back to previous page