Julia Ward Howe
plaster, c. 1914
P.P. Caproni and Brother cast
Museum purchase
Abolitionist Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) is the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” After the Civil War, she became a champion of women’s rights. (Some speculate that it was a response to her difficult marriage.) Julia Ward Howe was the first president of the New England Women’s Suffrage Association and instrumental in creating Mother’s Day. Her husband, the abolitionist and Transcendentalist Samuel Gridley Howe, was the esteemed educator and manager of the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts.