October 22, 2024 • 32 mins
Julia Ward Howe led one of the most significant lives in US history. She was a poet, feminist, political reformer, champion of international pacifism, and much more. Dr. Elaine Showalter joins us to discuss Julia Ward Howe’s life, and the various civil wars she witnessed and had to fight. From composing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to writing the Mothers’ Day Proclamation for peace, she was a very strong force in an America that was growing up to become a world power. Episode 270.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Hello, everyone, it's me, it's Professor Buzzkill. You know, yesterday
I introduced this concept of having a week dedicated to
shows about Julia Ward Howe and the Battle Hymn of
the Republic. And fortunately for all of you, we have
on the line from Princeton Professor Elaine Showalter, the author
of The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe, which was
(00:34):
a biography of Julia Ward Howe from twenty seventeen, but
also a sort of general discussion of the whole period
and a lot of her work. Really, it was the
big book at the time. Professor I remember when it
came out and we all went nuts, because if I
can just read one quick quote that Harold Holtzer, the
Lincoln scholar wrote, Glory, Glory, Hallelujah at Last, a full,
(00:57):
fine modern biography, modern biography of the independent woman whose
words reanimated the Civil War. No, you can't get a
better book board than that.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
No, I was really thrilled about. She's really a huge subject.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
And what excited me about it.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
You know, the title the Civil Wars is plural, because
what I want to say is that she was fighting
a political battle but also a private one, and the
other civil war was in her marriage, and it's the
classic story that you know, you look at it thought
a great woman certainly in earlier centuries, and it's very
unusual to find somebody whose husband was totally supportive. And
(01:37):
he's her husband, very interesting person in his own right.
But their partnership was started out as a partnership and
then really declined and changed is such an.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Important part of her story.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
She had to liberate herself while she approached the country,
and the battle him was certainly a stage a step
in that fight, that.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Per private fight.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Well, let's start with the beginning her early life and
up to her marriage. What was her biographical background reach,
I mean, you show very clearly in the book, and
I don't want to give away the story because we
want people to get the book. You know, it's an
absolutely fascinating family life, parentage, ancestry, and then continuing on
through her marriage.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Well, she grew up in most extraordinarily rich family in
New York. Her father was a multimillionaire. There were three
daughters and three sons. Her mother died quite young, when
she was quite young, and the father built a magnificent
house in what is now pretty much soho and furnished
it with everything that he could imagine would be educational
(02:41):
and aspiring. But both his daughters and his sons, and
he spared no money. He certainly spared no money educating
the sons who went off and they went to university.
They went to Columbia, among the first Americans to graduate
from Columbia Universities. It was being formed. And he had
wonderful tutors for the daughters. Naturally, daughters in the early
(03:01):
nineteenth century, you're not going to go to college. They're
not going to be educated past what we would think
of as junior high. She was lucky in having private tutors.
She was very good at languages, and.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
So she maintained her work with French.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
And German, but her formal education stopped young. Her informal education,
on the other hand, was really tremendous. She had the
run of the library in her father's home. Her brothers
brought home their collections from Europe, and one brother and
particularly brought back all these books in French and German.
Many of them would be considered, you know, very risquae,
(03:38):
very very much unsuitable for the eyes of a young lady.
So she read a lot, and that was a great
opportunity for her. On the other hand, she having the
big brothers and growing up in that era where she
had to be chaperoned every time she left the house.
She understood from birth, from early childhood, what it was
like to be inferior, like to live in a patriarchy.
(04:01):
And she did have a real patriarch as a father,
And although her brothers were incredibly supportive and wonderful and
they were all very close, she could see that she
was never going to have the kind of freedom and
support in the family that they took as absolutely.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Natural as their due.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Do you think that that sort of led to her
embracing the types of social reform that she embraced. For instance,
she embraces abolitionism, the abolition of slavery.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Well, yeah, that came a lot later.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
I mean, I think, yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
And she did.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I would not call it a liberal household.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
I think she had an instinct.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
I think as a daughter, as a woman, she had
an intuitive identification with the underdog, with the repressed.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
But as a child she did. I mean, she was.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Really locked up in many ways, and she jokes about
it in her memoirs that it was true and I
like to compare her with Walt Whitman.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
If you think about it, in order to really.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Get what it was about someone like Julie Waird, how
do you have to think about what her age, who
had the same ambitions were doing. She's virtually the same
age as Walt Whitman, and they were growing up in
almost exactly the same time in New York City. Now,
Whitman was growing up in Brooklyn in a very poor family.
He went to work when he was fourteen. He went
(05:19):
all over the city. You know, he was totally free.
He could go anywhere he wanted as a teenager. He
went to the docks, he went to the bars, he
went to the prisons. You know, he was completely in
touch with it all. He was in touch with his
own sexuality. He was writing about his own sexuality. And
he had this incredibly deep and wide and positive sense
(05:40):
of America. This was not the case for her. She
did get to go to the opera that was considered approved.
She got to go to church every Sunday, and she
says church is really thing about women. In church, it's
where you wear your hat. This is where you wear
your new hat. And it gets commented on that was
about as far as it went, So she was not
(06:01):
really exposed to the kinds of radical things that she
would get too much later.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
And I don't know how much of it even penetrated
that household.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Well, that's fascinating. How then, after the Civil War starts,
at the very beginning of the Civil War, how then
do you think she comes to We'll get to the
story of how she wrote the Battle him specifically, but
what's her basic view on the Civil War and if
you will, righteousness of the Civil War, the righteousness of
the Union cause, and things like that. How does she
get to those opinions?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
I think for Julia, and I can't generalize about it,
but I think for Julia came out of personal experience.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
She was never an idy logue.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Of course, by the time the Civil War started, she
was a Bostonian. She grew up in New York, but
her life was spent in Boston, and Boston was a
stronghold of abolitionism, so she many many friends and chev himself,
her husband was a radical abolitionist and quite a reckless one,
and he actually got mixed up with John Brown's attempt
(07:02):
you know, over so the government and so on. They
grew up, and that was one very positive thing about
the marriage. She grew up in the hotbed of abolitionism,
and I think that her sense of the futility and
waste of first of all of slavery, but secondly of
war bleudged was intense and it came out of her
MILLI yere, came out of her philosophical readings and so on.
(07:26):
So I think she would have come to it in
any case. And as I said, I think as a
woman she identified with the slave as a New.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
England woman, did I mean, they got it what that
could be like?
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Well, so many of us have heard the story of
how she wrote The Battle of the Republic was in
the ken Burns Civil War series. It's repeated a lot,
but I always had to remind myself the ken Burns
Civil War documentary series is actually quite old now, so
I think lots of our listeners haven't heard this story.
And it's a wonderful story about how she came to
(08:00):
write The Battle him now, but I don't want to
give it. Your version is so much better and so
much more close to what actually happened.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Well, when the Civil War began, Julia married a doctor.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
He was a doctor who had never really been in
private practice. He was a very political creature, very idealistic man.
When he graduated from medical school, instead of practicing, he
went to Greece to fight in the Greek Revolution against
the Turks, like Lord Byron, who.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Was one of his great heroes.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
And he then became very much involved from the beginning
in the Union side of the Civil Wars. Lincoln asked
him to Washington to be the head of what they
call the Sanitary Service, the medical services of the Union Army.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
So she knew about.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
That, and when the war started, she was really a
kind of a bystander.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
She writes in her journals.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
She kept all these wonderful journals and corresponded with her
sisters or two sisters, so we know a lot about
what she was thinking, which is a great obviously a
great wound to a biographer. And she was agonized because
she was not a boy. We may all come with
a lot of women during the Civil War felt that,
you know, they thought it was terrible to have to stay.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
At home and make bandages and knit.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Stockings, and so when they wanted to fight, they felt
so strongly about it. So her first feelings in the
Civil War were intense frustration. And then Shad her husband
became the head of the military services, and she got
to travel to Washington with him. It was on a
big trip to Washington, which was for her, you know, tourism.
That's really all she was allowed to do. But one
(09:37):
day while he while her husband was you know, making
talking to Lincoln and so on, she met Lincoln. Interestingly,
like many contemporaries of Lincoln before the Civil War, had
a very low opinion of him. It's really fascinating to
read this. And she regarded she was a very educated Bostonian.
She thought Lincoln was a total bumpkin and she said, well,
(09:58):
what he has going for? He is honest, dabe. But
they thought he was, you know, real backwoods character. So
that Lincoln really, you know, of course he rose to
the occasion. His great power and his great eloquence and
nobility came out. But she went when she went down
to Washington, then they first met Lincoln and then Shell
went off into his work and she went out on
(10:19):
a kind of a tour really for other Bostonians that
were there. And they said, let's go out and see
what's going on. And the Civil War was one of
those battles like the Napoleonic Wars that people went to
look at amazingly. There was going to be a big
battle in Virginia, and they were let's let's drive down
and take a look. So they went down and things
were pretty quiet as they went down, and then there.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Was a skirmish. People started fighting, and so they said, well,
let's look. Go back to Washington.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
And she was riding back to Washington in a kind
of open carriage. And as they were in this carriage,
the soldiers, some of the soldiers in retreat, were going by,
and they were singing to the tune that we all know.
I came about John Brown, Body, the Mouldreen and It's Grave,
which we all.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Know the tune of the battle hymn.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
And they were all listening to it as they drove
slowly around along back to Washington. And one of the
people in the carriage with her, who was actually a
minister and her friend, said to her, missus, how you
should write better words to this tune. And it was
very important that it was a minister and a man
(11:26):
too who said this to her, because it was giving
her permission.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
She was made to feel extremely guilty.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
About her poetry by her husband, and he had pretty
much said to her, you were forbidden to publish because
her first book of poems, which she published anonymously, had
some very satirical poems about him. He had really he
was punishing her, really, but this was it was a
terrible moment.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
This was a clergyman who told her to do it.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
So she felt she had permission and she had a
kind of divine race to carry it on.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
She thought, I'm a titled but she didn't really know
what she was going to say.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
It was very much in her mind, and she thought
about it.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
All that day, and then that night she went to
sleep in the Willard Hotel in Washington.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
I live in Washington. That's where I am now.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
And the Willard Hotel has a plaque outside about Julia Wardhowe,
which people usually ignore. That she wouldn't sleep in the
same room with her smallest baby.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
She did not share the room with her husband.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
But she was sleeping in the room with her baby,
you know, give him a good night's rest. And in fact,
they we're not sleeping together at that point. And in
the middle of the night, she says, she suddenly woke
up and the words were in her head, and she
didn't want to wake up the baby, so she didn't
turn on the lights.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
She got out of bed.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
She said she had a little piece of pencil and
by moonlight scribbled down the words of.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
The battle hymn.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Woke up in the morning and copied it out on
the paper that the Willard Hotel supplied, So she's got
the hotel paper was for the first draft, and she
gave it. She showed it to the minister and he said,
I think this is really good.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
They went back to Boston.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
She sent it to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly,
and that was a kind of a bold thing for
her to do, because you know, she had been told
don't publish your work, but she knew.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
That this was different, this was an exception.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
And she sent it to the editor of the Atlantic
Monthly and he said, this is perfect, this is just right.
And he put it on the cover of the Atlantic
Monthly in February eighteen sixty two, and it said what
so many people felt. It was so inspiring, It was
a really majestic poem, and it was I think, you know,
(13:41):
one of her very best poems. There are a handful
of poems that stand out, and it is certainly among
the two or three.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Best writing to music.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Writing to a song was very very good for her
because a lot of her poetry is written in a
kind of jingly quatrain. I mean, she overused it a
hymn meter four lines a B A B rhyme, which
was quite limiting, I think, But when she was using
the music, she could write a bigger line. She was,
(14:11):
you know, a fuller line, and it really liberated her imagination.
And so I think the lyric is very powerful, and
the several verses, you know, and really gave her opportunities
to use the full linguistic resources that she possessed. So
it was a it was a very lucky moment for her,
in a very lucky birth of that great poem. And
(14:33):
I always say about this, it's the only poem that Americans,
you know, by harsh.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
That's right, it comes from them, that's true.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Yeah, that's right, that's right. It's been sung so many
times in so many different contexts. But of course this
story has been told, the story of the writing has
been told, and she was often asked at the time
in the succeeding months after the publication, and oh, by
the way, publishing it on the cover of The Atlantic
was a really big deal.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Yes, it was incredible coupe and she got well, she
got paid for it. She she got two bucks for
yet that.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
But she was asked by several people in the early
part of the war to retell the story of how
she wrote it. And I've always thought that was fascinating.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Well, I mean, she became such a celebrity during her lifetime,
and it's the same thing now. You know, wherever she went,
first of all, that's what the orchestra would play. If
there was a choir, that's what they would sing. And
then they wanted her to sing. She had actually a
beautiful voice, a real operatic soprano contralto voice, and everywhere
(15:38):
she had been called as a young woman, she had
been called diva. She sang and that was one of
the things that her father, one of the kinds of
lessons her father had given her to shoot a beautiful voice.
And everywhere she went people would ask her to sing it,
and she did. It was her trademark. And I think
afterwhy she got pretty tired of it. You know, it
was sort of like it's almost at the very end
of her life. One of the very very last public
(16:00):
appearances that she made was at Smith College, one of
the first is the Women's College, and when she got there,
of course there it went again. And I think at
that moment your Julie's kind of rolling her eyes and thinking,
not again, here we go. But it was it was
her trademark, and people wanted to honor her. And even
now it is played all over the world. It has
(16:20):
become something that's played at state funerals of great leaders,
and whether not just Americans certainly, certainly British, certainly other countries,
it's played at inaugurations and it's played at funerals.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
So it was a mighty achievement.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Does a term that literary critics use for a poet
who has only one great poet, who call.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
Her a mono poet? Okay, so she was a mono poet.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
But if you've only going to write one poem that
was the poem to write, you could be famous to
one poet. You could do a lot worse right, And
Americans know it by heart. So everything came together in
that moment, and I think the idea of a battle
him that title being.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Given to it was so expressive.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Of her own sense of fighting, of having a battle
in her marriage as the country was going through.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
A terrible battle.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
And I sometimes think maybe this is an overstatement, and
I don't usually like to say things like the most
or the best or the most power. But I think
it's our best song as America. I really do. I
think it's our most important song in our history and
our best song, especially given the context.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
I wouldn't disagree with you at all.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
I mean, for a long time people wanted to make
it the national anthem, and I think it was a
loss that they didn't. That you did a lot easier
to sing the Stars Bank. I mean, nobody, we do it. Everybody,
you know, everybody's voices breaks trying to do that, even musicians.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
No.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
I think it would have been a great national myth
of Teddy Rooseveld. I think was the last president who
really tried. But it is something that everybody knows, and
that's kind of helpful.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
And she had the glory of that.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
And it's very interesting about you know, what's happened to
the manuscript if you would want to know, I mean
the original. There were two versions that were very valuable.
The first one was her handwritten copy and it was
sent She sent it to her one of her best
friends in Boston signed and it went through various stages.
(18:29):
But in twenty twelve, I mean, Issella's manuscript is still around.
It was signed by how It was autographed, and it
was sold by Christie's for seven hundred and eighty two
thousand dollars, which is not bad. Yeah, And actually I
know who owned it before that. It had been owned
by Malcolm Forbes. Wow, and he had kept in his collection.
(18:50):
But I don't know where it is now where that manuscript,
It's in private hands.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
But it became more and more valuable.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Well, you know, if that was the only thing in
her career, then it would be a wonderful career, be
a wonderful and very American career. But then she goes
on to after the war to push for female suffrage.
I find I find this part of her life just fascinating.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Well, it is fascinating.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
I identified with it so profoundly. I mean, I learned
so much about Juliet Wardhowe. I was writing the book.
You know, ninety eight percent of what it's in the
biography I didn't know when I started. And she has
her papers, in the papers of the whole how family,
which was a huge family, are in the Harvard Library
and they are vast, I mean, absolutely enormous. So there's
(19:40):
a lot to find out about her and a lot
that she recorded. But her relationship to the women's movement
is one of the most aspiring things for me. She
had never thought of herself as a feminist, and when
the war was over she became. Really you asked me
or how she became a pacifist, it was, you know,
(20:02):
going through the Civil War, seeing the incredible carnage of
the Civil War, she became. She was not a pacifist
at all when it started, but she was a pastist
by the end. And the house lost their own son,
who was just an infant. So although they didn't have
a military loss, they had a personal loss and grief,
and that pushed her in the direction of pacifism.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
But when the war was.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Over, almost accidentally, she went to her first suffrage meeting
and this was in Boston. And despite her intuitive feminism,
I mean, she was you know, she was born. Her
family made her a feminist because you know, the way
they treated her. But she hadn't really thought of herself
in those terms, and the reputation of suffragists was so awful.
(20:51):
They were considered, you know, just so ugly, unfeminine, childless
cat ladies, you know, that kind of thing. No decent
Boston made wanted to identify with them. But she was
quite determined. And she read in the newspaper in Boston
that there was going to be a meeting of the
what would become the New England Women's Suffrage Association. There
(21:13):
would be a meeting at the Unitarian Church, and in
fear and trembling, she decided to go.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
And she says it was a rainy day, and she says, I.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Wore my rain garment, which I imagined to look like
a trench.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Coat, you know, and what a rain garment looked like.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
And she pulled up the hood and she snuck into
the Unitarian church and sat in the very back and
there were the suffragists up in the front, and one
by one they started to speak, and it was like love,
it's at first sight, Kudafula. I mean, they got up
and these are my sisters. These are not the women
that I've been reading about. This is my soul, this
(21:50):
is it. And she immediately presented herself and identified. So
it was it was really, you know, meant to be
and she she got it right away. And I didn't
know this when it happened to me, but this very
much the way I joined the women's movement.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
I was living in Princeton.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
I had been in Paris with my husband and had
seen what French feminism was like in nineteen sixty nine,
during the sixty eight and sixty nine, and when I
came back it was just beginning to start in the US.
And in Princeton, we had a little freetown paper that
came around and there was a little teeny notice in
it that said, on Thursday, seven pm gathering and the
(22:30):
Unitarian Church's where everything is. Even now you want to
you know, you have any issue as a parent or whatever,
just go to the Unitarian Church. So it was announced
the Unitarian Church, and I, not knowing about you, I said, okay,
I'm going to go, and I put on my raincoat
and exactly the same experience. Went to the Unitarian Church.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
And that was my first meeting with the Women's movement.
And it was a tremendous.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Moment for Julia, not only to meet a group of
women who so much shared her values and her political
energy and her courage, you know, but also to meet
a group of women who would become her friends.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
She has not had that many women friends.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
She had two sisters and they were very, very close,
but they were all married. They were scattered around the
world at that point, and the idea of being part
of a crusade of women was very important to her personally.
And she really loved being in the women's movement. Speaking
for the women's movement. She loved traveling around the country,
which she eventually did, to all kinds of small towns
(23:37):
and dusty planes, you know, villages and so on, and
meeting the local women.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
It was a very fulfilling moment.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
That really was to be the direction of the second
half of her life.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Well, she doesn't live, of course, to see women's suffrage
pass in the United States. No, but she continues along
other lines. And I think one of the most fascinating things,
and it's completely overlooked. It's been swamped by our current.
I'll put that in quotation. Marks version of Mother's Day
was her famous proclamation in eighteen seventy about that. Yeah,
(24:13):
how did she come to Well, first of all, let's
tell you you don't mind telling everyone what that proclamation
was about. But how did she come to be that
kind of pacifist.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Well, it came out of her pacifism, and it came
on the occasion of another war, and this was after
the Fraango Frussian War, and she started to think about
the nature of war itself. Julia thought of herself as
a philosopher, philosopher man kay because she was a woman.
She couldn't really take herself here, or she wasn't taken
seriously as a philosopher. But a lot of her private
(24:46):
reading was in philosophy. She really enjoyed delving into philosophy
and thinking about the most abstruse thinkers of her time.
And she thought that there was something very important about
the philosophy of war, and something that was gender. When
she had written about the Civil War, she had thought
that the Civil War was a kind of holy war.
(25:08):
It was really a war, you know, a good war,
just war.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
War that had to be fought.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
But she thought that other wars, the Franco Prussian War
certainly were unholy.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
And she felt that women ought to be the leaders.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Of a movement for peace because they were the mothers
of the country. They had stakes of love and devotion
and thought that mothers, if mothers could unify against the war,
that could be a powerful form of organization, an important
way to go.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
So she wrote a proclamation, calling it a sermon.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
She thought it might be used in church, that could
be given on a special Mother's.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Day in church every year.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Her idea was that Mother's Day every year would be
on the second of June, and she wrote it down
a rise, then, women of this day arise, all women
who have hearts, say firmly, we will not have great question,
since decided by irrelevant agencies, our sons shall not be
taken from us to unlearn all that is we have
(26:07):
been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
We women of one country will.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Be too tender of those of another country to allow
our sons to be trained to injure thors. So it
came out of her feminism, the idea that as women
could identify with mothers everywhere, and that her political feelings
and her feminist feelings really came.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Together at this moment.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
So she issued this call, and that would be Mother's Day,
and it's now people don't acknowledge it. On Mother's day
every year, very really acknowledge it, and it's just, you know,
a gift by an occasion, you know, a good day
for Hallmark greeting cards, but not as a pacifist and
political statement for women.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Well, you see, this is what I'm kind of getting at.
She has the Battle him in eighteen sixty one, she
has the push for suffrage very very early, yeah, you know,
and then the Proclamation of eighteen seventy. And by the way, listeners,
the Franco Prussian War was particularly brutal because it was
the first major industrial war, so the death tolls were
(27:11):
just enormous, and even in the United States people were
reading these horrible accounts of soldiers being ground down by
machines essentially. But anyway, so the battle Hymn, the suffrage movement,
and then the Proclamation for peace. This is the triple
crown of heroism in an historical figure. It seems to
me it is, Yeah, you know, Julia wardhowse should be
on our currency, her portraits should be on our currency,
(27:33):
and one of the people should be She's extremely extremely significant.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
I thought so too. I mean, I wrote the biography
with that in mind.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
And people don't know women to be celebrated anyway. But
you know, we have so little public statuary for women,
even you know where Julia is buried in Boston.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
I mean her tombstone says daughter of.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Wife of sc how you know women's She doesn't have
even a monument of the kind that she should have.
And you're absolutely right, there are very few things named
for her. There's no college named for her. There aren't
that many streets named for her. It's a scandal.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
It is a scandal. There should be a monument outside
DC at roughly the point where she crosses the lines
and hears the soldiers singing John Brown's body.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yeah, well there are to be a statue outside the
Willard Hotel.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Well, yeah, absolutely little plaque.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
You would never notice it. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
I mean, our women are so so uncelebrated. And you know, maybe,
well let's see what happens this year.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
I don't know, you can always.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
It's just there's a lot more to be done. That's
really good to say about that. And she was in
her lifetime, she saw herself become a national.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Figure, a national treasures.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Her reputation outpaced that of her husband, and his was
really huge, very large. He was a huge philanthropist. He
founded the Perkin School for the Blind. He was a
doctor who taught the blind and deaf, so he had,
you know, enormous prestige. But by the time she died,
nobody even remembered who he was. And that was I
think was welcomed her. She's not so modest. You know,
(29:18):
she's going to.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Shrug it off.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
But I think that, you know, that fades away so fast.
It's one of the things that fascinated me about writing
the biography of Julia Ward. How is that there are
so just generally, there are so few biographies of great women,
and even if there are, they absolutely don't approach the
scale of biographies of men. There are only two biographies
(29:43):
of women that are three volumes. There are dozens of
biographies of men go into multiple volumes. I mean for women,
you know, one volume is planning two. Oh my god,
when Tori A gets two, you know, nobody else gets
more than one. But when Julia died, her daughters, who
were all writers, published a kind of biographer of her,
(30:06):
really a kind of memoir includes lots and lots of
letters and journals, and that was very important, and it
won the Pulitzer Prize. For biography, the very first one
that was ever given. So yeah, that's something and I
like that. But really it's a fight to keep women's
history alive. It's just one of the first things to
(30:29):
go and it isn't preserved, and it isn't visible. And
I think raising the question of the monument is so
key in Washington. There are all these tours of Washington.
None of the tours talk about Julia Ward. How nobody
stops to tell that story.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
In fact that I'm talking to you, I'm thinking, hmmm,
o Ed, I'm getting this in my mind. I'm obvious.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Why not, Well, then, professor, you know, one of the
reasons we're doing this show this week is because there
is an election coming up, and we don't like to
promote political parties on the show, but this election is
just life and death for the country. And when you
and I were talking about how we're going to approach
this interview before we started talking we restore recording, you
(31:13):
said something like, well, of course we know that it's
not the national anthem, but there's something. There's a time
and a place for this to be played, and if
the right things happen in November, it might be played
in January. Please tell the listeners what you mean by that.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
This could be.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
I mean, I can imagine it's always always played at
the inauguration of American presidents, and if it could be
Kamala Harris, Julia's kind of I don't know her work
or sequence. I cannot imagine a great or fulfillment of.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
What she would have dreamed, what she would have.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Wanted, and to have the battle him played at the
inauguration as the first woman president of the United States,
she would love to deliver it. And I think, you know,
those of us have a lot of us are hoping
to live to see it, but it would be perfect,
perfect moments.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Well, it's only really left for me to say thank
you so much, doctor Showalter for coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Well, thank you so much. It's been fun talking.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
To you and folks. The book The Civil Wars of
Julia Ward Howe is on the Buzzkill bookshelf on the
blog post for this week, and because we're doing Julia
Ward shows all week, we will talk to you tomorrow
Hello, everyone, it's me, it's Professor Buzzkill. You know, yesterday
I introduced this concept of having a week dedicated to
shows about Julia Ward Howe and the Battle Hymn of
the Republic. And fortunately for all of you, we have
on the line from Princeton Professor Elaine Showalter, the author
of The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe, which was
(00:34):
a biography of Julia Ward Howe from twenty seventeen, but
also a sort of general discussion of the whole period
and a lot of her work. Really, it was the
big book at the time. Professor I remember when it
came out and we all went nuts, because if I
can just read one quick quote that Harold Holtzer, the
Lincoln scholar wrote, Glory, Glory, Hallelujah at Last, a full,
(00:57):
fine modern biography, modern biography of the independent woman whose
words reanimated the Civil War. No, you can't get a
better book board than that.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
No, I was really thrilled about. She's really a huge subject.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
And what excited me about it.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
You know, the title the Civil Wars is plural, because
what I want to say is that she was fighting
a political battle but also a private one, and the
other civil war was in her marriage, and it's the
classic story that you know, you look at it thought
a great woman certainly in earlier centuries, and it's very
unusual to find somebody whose husband was totally supportive. And
(01:37):
he's her husband, very interesting person in his own right.
But their partnership was started out as a partnership and
then really declined and changed is such an.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Important part of her story.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
She had to liberate herself while she approached the country,
and the battle him was certainly a stage a step
in that fight, that.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Per private fight.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Well, let's start with the beginning her early life and
up to her marriage. What was her biographical background reach,
I mean, you show very clearly in the book, and
I don't want to give away the story because we
want people to get the book. You know, it's an
absolutely fascinating family life, parentage, ancestry, and then continuing on
through her marriage.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Well, she grew up in most extraordinarily rich family in
New York. Her father was a multimillionaire. There were three
daughters and three sons. Her mother died quite young, when
she was quite young, and the father built a magnificent
house in what is now pretty much soho and furnished
it with everything that he could imagine would be educational
(02:41):
and aspiring. But both his daughters and his sons, and
he spared no money. He certainly spared no money educating
the sons who went off and they went to university.
They went to Columbia, among the first Americans to graduate
from Columbia Universities. It was being formed. And he had
wonderful tutors for the daughters. Naturally, daughters in the early
(03:01):
nineteenth century, you're not going to go to college. They're
not going to be educated past what we would think
of as junior high. She was lucky in having private tutors.
She was very good at languages, and.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
So she maintained her work with French.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
And German, but her formal education stopped young. Her informal education,
on the other hand, was really tremendous. She had the
run of the library in her father's home. Her brothers
brought home their collections from Europe, and one brother and
particularly brought back all these books in French and German.
Many of them would be considered, you know, very risquae,
(03:38):
very very much unsuitable for the eyes of a young lady.
So she read a lot, and that was a great
opportunity for her. On the other hand, she having the
big brothers and growing up in that era where she
had to be chaperoned every time she left the house.
She understood from birth, from early childhood, what it was
like to be inferior, like to live in a patriarchy.
(04:01):
And she did have a real patriarch as a father,
And although her brothers were incredibly supportive and wonderful and
they were all very close, she could see that she
was never going to have the kind of freedom and
support in the family that they took as absolutely.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Natural as their due.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Do you think that that sort of led to her
embracing the types of social reform that she embraced. For instance,
she embraces abolitionism, the abolition of slavery.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Well, yeah, that came a lot later.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
I mean, I think, yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
And she did.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I would not call it a liberal household.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
I think she had an instinct.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
I think as a daughter, as a woman, she had
an intuitive identification with the underdog, with the repressed.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
But as a child she did. I mean, she was.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Really locked up in many ways, and she jokes about
it in her memoirs that it was true and I
like to compare her with Walt Whitman.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
If you think about it, in order to really.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Get what it was about someone like Julie Waird, how
do you have to think about what her age, who
had the same ambitions were doing. She's virtually the same
age as Walt Whitman, and they were growing up in
almost exactly the same time in New York City. Now,
Whitman was growing up in Brooklyn in a very poor family.
He went to work when he was fourteen. He went
(05:19):
all over the city. You know, he was totally free.
He could go anywhere he wanted as a teenager. He
went to the docks, he went to the bars, he
went to the prisons. You know, he was completely in
touch with it all. He was in touch with his
own sexuality. He was writing about his own sexuality. And
he had this incredibly deep and wide and positive sense
(05:40):
of America. This was not the case for her. She
did get to go to the opera that was considered approved.
She got to go to church every Sunday, and she
says church is really thing about women. In church, it's
where you wear your hat. This is where you wear
your new hat. And it gets commented on that was
about as far as it went, So she was not
(06:01):
really exposed to the kinds of radical things that she
would get too much later.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
And I don't know how much of it even penetrated
that household.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Well, that's fascinating. How then, after the Civil War starts,
at the very beginning of the Civil War, how then
do you think she comes to We'll get to the
story of how she wrote the Battle him specifically, but
what's her basic view on the Civil War and if
you will, righteousness of the Civil War, the righteousness of
the Union cause, and things like that. How does she
get to those opinions?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
I think for Julia, and I can't generalize about it,
but I think for Julia came out of personal experience.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
She was never an idy logue.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Of course, by the time the Civil War started, she
was a Bostonian. She grew up in New York, but
her life was spent in Boston, and Boston was a
stronghold of abolitionism, so she many many friends and chev himself,
her husband was a radical abolitionist and quite a reckless one,
and he actually got mixed up with John Brown's attempt
(07:02):
you know, over so the government and so on. They
grew up, and that was one very positive thing about
the marriage. She grew up in the hotbed of abolitionism,
and I think that her sense of the futility and
waste of first of all of slavery, but secondly of
war bleudged was intense and it came out of her
MILLI yere, came out of her philosophical readings and so on.
(07:26):
So I think she would have come to it in
any case. And as I said, I think as a
woman she identified with the slave as a New.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
England woman, did I mean, they got it what that
could be like?
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Well, so many of us have heard the story of
how she wrote The Battle of the Republic was in
the ken Burns Civil War series. It's repeated a lot,
but I always had to remind myself the ken Burns
Civil War documentary series is actually quite old now, so
I think lots of our listeners haven't heard this story.
And it's a wonderful story about how she came to
(08:00):
write The Battle him now, but I don't want to
give it. Your version is so much better and so
much more close to what actually happened.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Well, when the Civil War began, Julia married a doctor.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
He was a doctor who had never really been in
private practice. He was a very political creature, very idealistic man.
When he graduated from medical school, instead of practicing, he
went to Greece to fight in the Greek Revolution against
the Turks, like Lord Byron, who.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Was one of his great heroes.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
And he then became very much involved from the beginning
in the Union side of the Civil Wars. Lincoln asked
him to Washington to be the head of what they
call the Sanitary Service, the medical services of the Union Army.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
So she knew about.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
That, and when the war started, she was really a
kind of a bystander.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
She writes in her journals.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
She kept all these wonderful journals and corresponded with her
sisters or two sisters, so we know a lot about
what she was thinking, which is a great obviously a
great wound to a biographer. And she was agonized because
she was not a boy. We may all come with
a lot of women during the Civil War felt that,
you know, they thought it was terrible to have to stay.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
At home and make bandages and knit.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Stockings, and so when they wanted to fight, they felt
so strongly about it. So her first feelings in the
Civil War were intense frustration. And then Shad her husband
became the head of the military services, and she got
to travel to Washington with him. It was on a
big trip to Washington, which was for her, you know, tourism.
That's really all she was allowed to do. But one
(09:37):
day while he while her husband was you know, making
talking to Lincoln and so on, she met Lincoln. Interestingly,
like many contemporaries of Lincoln before the Civil War, had
a very low opinion of him. It's really fascinating to
read this. And she regarded she was a very educated Bostonian.
She thought Lincoln was a total bumpkin and she said, well,
(09:58):
what he has going for? He is honest, dabe. But
they thought he was, you know, real backwoods character. So
that Lincoln really, you know, of course he rose to
the occasion. His great power and his great eloquence and
nobility came out. But she went when she went down
to Washington, then they first met Lincoln and then Shell
went off into his work and she went out on
(10:19):
a kind of a tour really for other Bostonians that
were there. And they said, let's go out and see
what's going on. And the Civil War was one of
those battles like the Napoleonic Wars that people went to
look at amazingly. There was going to be a big
battle in Virginia, and they were let's let's drive down
and take a look. So they went down and things
were pretty quiet as they went down, and then there.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Was a skirmish. People started fighting, and so they said, well,
let's look. Go back to Washington.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
And she was riding back to Washington in a kind
of open carriage. And as they were in this carriage,
the soldiers, some of the soldiers in retreat, were going by,
and they were singing to the tune that we all know.
I came about John Brown, Body, the Mouldreen and It's Grave,
which we all.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Know the tune of the battle hymn.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
And they were all listening to it as they drove
slowly around along back to Washington. And one of the
people in the carriage with her, who was actually a
minister and her friend, said to her, missus, how you
should write better words to this tune. And it was
very important that it was a minister and a man
(11:26):
too who said this to her, because it was giving
her permission.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
She was made to feel extremely guilty.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
About her poetry by her husband, and he had pretty
much said to her, you were forbidden to publish because
her first book of poems, which she published anonymously, had
some very satirical poems about him. He had really he
was punishing her, really, but this was it was a
terrible moment.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
This was a clergyman who told her to do it.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
So she felt she had permission and she had a
kind of divine race to carry it on.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
She thought, I'm a titled but she didn't really know
what she was going to say.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
It was very much in her mind, and she thought
about it.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
All that day, and then that night she went to
sleep in the Willard Hotel in Washington.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
I live in Washington. That's where I am now.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
And the Willard Hotel has a plaque outside about Julia Wardhowe,
which people usually ignore. That she wouldn't sleep in the
same room with her smallest baby.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
She did not share the room with her husband.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
But she was sleeping in the room with her baby,
you know, give him a good night's rest. And in fact,
they we're not sleeping together at that point. And in
the middle of the night, she says, she suddenly woke
up and the words were in her head, and she
didn't want to wake up the baby, so she didn't
turn on the lights.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
She got out of bed.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
She said she had a little piece of pencil and
by moonlight scribbled down the words of.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
The battle hymn.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Woke up in the morning and copied it out on
the paper that the Willard Hotel supplied, So she's got
the hotel paper was for the first draft, and she
gave it. She showed it to the minister and he said,
I think this is really good.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
They went back to Boston.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
She sent it to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly,
and that was a kind of a bold thing for
her to do, because you know, she had been told
don't publish your work, but she knew.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
That this was different, this was an exception.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
And she sent it to the editor of the Atlantic
Monthly and he said, this is perfect, this is just right.
And he put it on the cover of the Atlantic
Monthly in February eighteen sixty two, and it said what
so many people felt. It was so inspiring, It was
a really majestic poem, and it was I think, you know,
(13:41):
one of her very best poems. There are a handful
of poems that stand out, and it is certainly among
the two or three.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Best writing to music.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Writing to a song was very very good for her
because a lot of her poetry is written in a
kind of jingly quatrain. I mean, she overused it a
hymn meter four lines a B A B rhyme, which
was quite limiting, I think, But when she was using
the music, she could write a bigger line. She was,
(14:11):
you know, a fuller line, and it really liberated her imagination.
And so I think the lyric is very powerful, and
the several verses, you know, and really gave her opportunities
to use the full linguistic resources that she possessed. So
it was a it was a very lucky moment for her,
in a very lucky birth of that great poem. And
(14:33):
I always say about this, it's the only poem that Americans,
you know, by harsh.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
That's right, it comes from them, that's true.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Yeah, that's right, that's right. It's been sung so many
times in so many different contexts. But of course this
story has been told, the story of the writing has
been told, and she was often asked at the time
in the succeeding months after the publication, and oh, by
the way, publishing it on the cover of The Atlantic
was a really big deal.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Yes, it was incredible coupe and she got well, she
got paid for it. She she got two bucks for
yet that.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
But she was asked by several people in the early
part of the war to retell the story of how
she wrote it. And I've always thought that was fascinating.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Well, I mean, she became such a celebrity during her lifetime,
and it's the same thing now. You know, wherever she went,
first of all, that's what the orchestra would play. If
there was a choir, that's what they would sing. And
then they wanted her to sing. She had actually a
beautiful voice, a real operatic soprano contralto voice, and everywhere
(15:38):
she had been called as a young woman, she had
been called diva. She sang and that was one of
the things that her father, one of the kinds of
lessons her father had given her to shoot a beautiful voice.
And everywhere she went people would ask her to sing it,
and she did. It was her trademark. And I think
afterwhy she got pretty tired of it. You know, it
was sort of like it's almost at the very end
of her life. One of the very very last public
(16:00):
appearances that she made was at Smith College, one of
the first is the Women's College, and when she got there,
of course there it went again. And I think at
that moment your Julie's kind of rolling her eyes and thinking,
not again, here we go. But it was it was
her trademark, and people wanted to honor her. And even
now it is played all over the world. It has
(16:20):
become something that's played at state funerals of great leaders,
and whether not just Americans certainly, certainly British, certainly other countries,
it's played at inaugurations and it's played at funerals.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
So it was a mighty achievement.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Does a term that literary critics use for a poet
who has only one great poet, who call.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
Her a mono poet? Okay, so she was a mono poet.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
But if you've only going to write one poem that
was the poem to write, you could be famous to
one poet. You could do a lot worse right, And
Americans know it by heart. So everything came together in
that moment, and I think the idea of a battle
him that title being.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Given to it was so expressive.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Of her own sense of fighting, of having a battle
in her marriage as the country was going through.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
A terrible battle.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
And I sometimes think maybe this is an overstatement, and
I don't usually like to say things like the most
or the best or the most power. But I think
it's our best song as America. I really do. I
think it's our most important song in our history and
our best song, especially given the context.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
I wouldn't disagree with you at all.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
I mean, for a long time people wanted to make
it the national anthem, and I think it was a
loss that they didn't. That you did a lot easier
to sing the Stars Bank. I mean, nobody, we do it. Everybody,
you know, everybody's voices breaks trying to do that, even musicians.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
No.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
I think it would have been a great national myth
of Teddy Rooseveld. I think was the last president who
really tried. But it is something that everybody knows, and
that's kind of helpful.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
And she had the glory of that.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
And it's very interesting about you know, what's happened to
the manuscript if you would want to know, I mean
the original. There were two versions that were very valuable.
The first one was her handwritten copy and it was
sent She sent it to her one of her best
friends in Boston signed and it went through various stages.
(18:29):
But in twenty twelve, I mean, Issella's manuscript is still around.
It was signed by how It was autographed, and it
was sold by Christie's for seven hundred and eighty two
thousand dollars, which is not bad. Yeah, And actually I
know who owned it before that. It had been owned
by Malcolm Forbes. Wow, and he had kept in his collection.
(18:50):
But I don't know where it is now where that manuscript,
It's in private hands.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
But it became more and more valuable.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Well, you know, if that was the only thing in
her career, then it would be a wonderful career, be
a wonderful and very American career. But then she goes
on to after the war to push for female suffrage.
I find I find this part of her life just fascinating.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Well, it is fascinating.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
I identified with it so profoundly. I mean, I learned
so much about Juliet Wardhowe. I was writing the book.
You know, ninety eight percent of what it's in the
biography I didn't know when I started. And she has
her papers, in the papers of the whole how family,
which was a huge family, are in the Harvard Library
and they are vast, I mean, absolutely enormous. So there's
(19:40):
a lot to find out about her and a lot
that she recorded. But her relationship to the women's movement
is one of the most aspiring things for me. She
had never thought of herself as a feminist, and when
the war was over she became. Really you asked me
or how she became a pacifist, it was, you know,
(20:02):
going through the Civil War, seeing the incredible carnage of
the Civil War, she became. She was not a pacifist
at all when it started, but she was a pastist
by the end. And the house lost their own son,
who was just an infant. So although they didn't have
a military loss, they had a personal loss and grief,
and that pushed her in the direction of pacifism.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
But when the war was.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Over, almost accidentally, she went to her first suffrage meeting
and this was in Boston. And despite her intuitive feminism,
I mean, she was you know, she was born. Her
family made her a feminist because you know, the way
they treated her. But she hadn't really thought of herself
in those terms, and the reputation of suffragists was so awful.
(20:51):
They were considered, you know, just so ugly, unfeminine, childless
cat ladies, you know, that kind of thing. No decent
Boston made wanted to identify with them. But she was
quite determined. And she read in the newspaper in Boston
that there was going to be a meeting of the
what would become the New England Women's Suffrage Association. There
(21:13):
would be a meeting at the Unitarian Church, and in
fear and trembling, she decided to go.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
And she says it was a rainy day, and she says, I.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Wore my rain garment, which I imagined to look like
a trench.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Coat, you know, and what a rain garment looked like.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
And she pulled up the hood and she snuck into
the Unitarian church and sat in the very back and
there were the suffragists up in the front, and one
by one they started to speak, and it was like love,
it's at first sight, Kudafula. I mean, they got up
and these are my sisters. These are not the women
that I've been reading about. This is my soul, this
(21:50):
is it. And she immediately presented herself and identified. So
it was it was really, you know, meant to be
and she she got it right away. And I didn't
know this when it happened to me, but this very
much the way I joined the women's movement.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
I was living in Princeton.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
I had been in Paris with my husband and had
seen what French feminism was like in nineteen sixty nine,
during the sixty eight and sixty nine, and when I
came back it was just beginning to start in the US.
And in Princeton, we had a little freetown paper that
came around and there was a little teeny notice in
it that said, on Thursday, seven pm gathering and the
(22:30):
Unitarian Church's where everything is. Even now you want to
you know, you have any issue as a parent or whatever,
just go to the Unitarian Church. So it was announced
the Unitarian Church, and I, not knowing about you, I said, okay,
I'm going to go, and I put on my raincoat
and exactly the same experience. Went to the Unitarian Church.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
And that was my first meeting with the Women's movement.
And it was a tremendous.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Moment for Julia, not only to meet a group of
women who so much shared her values and her political
energy and her courage, you know, but also to meet
a group of women who would become her friends.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
She has not had that many women friends.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
She had two sisters and they were very, very close,
but they were all married. They were scattered around the
world at that point, and the idea of being part
of a crusade of women was very important to her personally.
And she really loved being in the women's movement. Speaking
for the women's movement. She loved traveling around the country,
which she eventually did, to all kinds of small towns
(23:37):
and dusty planes, you know, villages and so on, and
meeting the local women.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
It was a very fulfilling moment.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
That really was to be the direction of the second
half of her life.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Well, she doesn't live, of course, to see women's suffrage
pass in the United States. No, but she continues along
other lines. And I think one of the most fascinating things,
and it's completely overlooked. It's been swamped by our current.
I'll put that in quotation. Marks version of Mother's Day
was her famous proclamation in eighteen seventy about that. Yeah,
(24:13):
how did she come to Well, first of all, let's
tell you you don't mind telling everyone what that proclamation
was about. But how did she come to be that
kind of pacifist.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Well, it came out of her pacifism, and it came
on the occasion of another war, and this was after
the Fraango Frussian War, and she started to think about
the nature of war itself. Julia thought of herself as
a philosopher, philosopher man kay because she was a woman.
She couldn't really take herself here, or she wasn't taken
seriously as a philosopher. But a lot of her private
(24:46):
reading was in philosophy. She really enjoyed delving into philosophy
and thinking about the most abstruse thinkers of her time.
And she thought that there was something very important about
the philosophy of war, and something that was gender. When
she had written about the Civil War, she had thought
that the Civil War was a kind of holy war.
(25:08):
It was really a war, you know, a good war,
just war.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
War that had to be fought.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
But she thought that other wars, the Franco Prussian War
certainly were unholy.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
And she felt that women ought to be the leaders.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Of a movement for peace because they were the mothers
of the country. They had stakes of love and devotion
and thought that mothers, if mothers could unify against the war,
that could be a powerful form of organization, an important
way to go.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
So she wrote a proclamation, calling it a sermon.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
She thought it might be used in church, that could
be given on a special Mother's.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Day in church every year.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Her idea was that Mother's Day every year would be
on the second of June, and she wrote it down
a rise, then, women of this day arise, all women
who have hearts, say firmly, we will not have great question,
since decided by irrelevant agencies, our sons shall not be
taken from us to unlearn all that is we have
(26:07):
been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
We women of one country will.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Be too tender of those of another country to allow
our sons to be trained to injure thors. So it
came out of her feminism, the idea that as women
could identify with mothers everywhere, and that her political feelings
and her feminist feelings really came.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Together at this moment.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
So she issued this call, and that would be Mother's Day,
and it's now people don't acknowledge it. On Mother's day
every year, very really acknowledge it, and it's just, you know,
a gift by an occasion, you know, a good day
for Hallmark greeting cards, but not as a pacifist and
political statement for women.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Well, you see, this is what I'm kind of getting at.
She has the Battle him in eighteen sixty one, she
has the push for suffrage very very early, yeah, you know,
and then the Proclamation of eighteen seventy. And by the way, listeners,
the Franco Prussian War was particularly brutal because it was
the first major industrial war, so the death tolls were
(27:11):
just enormous, and even in the United States people were
reading these horrible accounts of soldiers being ground down by
machines essentially. But anyway, so the battle Hymn, the suffrage movement,
and then the Proclamation for peace. This is the triple
crown of heroism in an historical figure. It seems to
me it is, Yeah, you know, Julia wardhowse should be
on our currency, her portraits should be on our currency,
(27:33):
and one of the people should be She's extremely extremely significant.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
I thought so too. I mean, I wrote the biography
with that in mind.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
And people don't know women to be celebrated anyway. But
you know, we have so little public statuary for women,
even you know where Julia is buried in Boston.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
I mean her tombstone says daughter of.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Wife of sc how you know women's She doesn't have
even a monument of the kind that she should have.
And you're absolutely right, there are very few things named
for her. There's no college named for her. There aren't
that many streets named for her. It's a scandal.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
It is a scandal. There should be a monument outside
DC at roughly the point where she crosses the lines
and hears the soldiers singing John Brown's body.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yeah, well there are to be a statue outside the
Willard Hotel.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Well, yeah, absolutely little plaque.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
You would never notice it. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
I mean, our women are so so uncelebrated. And you know, maybe,
well let's see what happens this year.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
I don't know, you can always.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
It's just there's a lot more to be done. That's
really good to say about that. And she was in
her lifetime, she saw herself become a national.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Figure, a national treasures.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Her reputation outpaced that of her husband, and his was
really huge, very large. He was a huge philanthropist. He
founded the Perkin School for the Blind. He was a
doctor who taught the blind and deaf, so he had,
you know, enormous prestige. But by the time she died,
nobody even remembered who he was. And that was I
think was welcomed her. She's not so modest. You know,
(29:18):
she's going to.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Shrug it off.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
But I think that, you know, that fades away so fast.
It's one of the things that fascinated me about writing
the biography of Julia Ward. How is that there are
so just generally, there are so few biographies of great women,
and even if there are, they absolutely don't approach the
scale of biographies of men. There are only two biographies
(29:43):
of women that are three volumes. There are dozens of
biographies of men go into multiple volumes. I mean for women,
you know, one volume is planning two. Oh my god,
when Tori A gets two, you know, nobody else gets
more than one. But when Julia died, her daughters, who
were all writers, published a kind of biographer of her,
(30:06):
really a kind of memoir includes lots and lots of
letters and journals, and that was very important, and it
won the Pulitzer Prize. For biography, the very first one
that was ever given. So yeah, that's something and I
like that. But really it's a fight to keep women's
history alive. It's just one of the first things to
(30:29):
go and it isn't preserved, and it isn't visible. And
I think raising the question of the monument is so
key in Washington. There are all these tours of Washington.
None of the tours talk about Julia Ward. How nobody
stops to tell that story.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
In fact that I'm talking to you, I'm thinking, hmmm,
o Ed, I'm getting this in my mind. I'm obvious.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Why not, Well, then, professor, you know, one of the
reasons we're doing this show this week is because there
is an election coming up, and we don't like to
promote political parties on the show, but this election is
just life and death for the country. And when you
and I were talking about how we're going to approach
this interview before we started talking we restore recording, you
(31:13):
said something like, well, of course we know that it's
not the national anthem, but there's something. There's a time
and a place for this to be played, and if
the right things happen in November, it might be played
in January. Please tell the listeners what you mean by that.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
This could be.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
I mean, I can imagine it's always always played at
the inauguration of American presidents, and if it could be
Kamala Harris, Julia's kind of I don't know her work
or sequence. I cannot imagine a great or fulfillment of.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
What she would have dreamed, what she would have.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Wanted, and to have the battle him played at the
inauguration as the first woman president of the United States,
she would love to deliver it. And I think, you know,
those of us have a lot of us are hoping
to live to see it, but it would be perfect,
perfect moments.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Well, it's only really left for me to say thank
you so much, doctor Showalter for coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Well, thank you so much. It's been fun talking.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
To you and folks. The book The Civil Wars of
Julia Ward Howe is on the Buzzkill bookshelf on the
blog post for this week, and because we're doing Julia
Ward shows all week, we will talk to you tomorrow
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.