Julia Ward Howe, born in New York City, was the daughter of a Wall Street broker and banker and of a mother who was a poet. Her mother died when she was five. She was educated by governesses and at young ladies' schools.

Julia had published essays on Goethe and Schiller before she married Samuel Gridley Howe, of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. Although they had six children, the marriage was tempestuous. He opposed her having any public role and also resented her having a legacy of $3,000 per year.

Julia Ward Howe was a friend of the prophetic preacher Theodore Parker. During the Civil War, her poem, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. It was an instant hit when sung to the tune of John Brown’s Body.

The embattled President Lincoln wept when he first heard it sung.

Julia Ward Howe became a transformer of culture: She was the coleader, with Lucy Stone, of the American Woman Suffrage Association; served as president of the American Association for Women; and helped to found the General Federation of Women's Clubs.

She was the founder of the weekly Woman’s Journal, and contributed for twenty years to its encouragement of coeducation, as well as advocating legal, racial, and gender equality.

She wrote a biography of Margaret Fuller.

She was the first women elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Julia Ward Howe was a Unitarian who sometimes preached from the pulpit of Boston’s esteemed Church of the Disciples, of which she was a member.

At her last party, before she died at the age of ninety-one, she insisted on sampling the champagne.

Only 4,000 people could be admitted to the memorial service honoring her that was held in Symphony Hall.