"Julia Ward Howe: Public and Private "

READING from Diva Julia, by Valarie H. Ziegler

Julia Ward Howe is known variously for writing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," a militant anti-slavery anthem, for provocative novels and poems exploring gender roles and sexuality, and for her post-Civil War campaign for the cause of peace and women's suffrage. These themes are intertwined throughout her life work.

According to her biographer Valarie H. Ziegler, "Julia's achievements in the cause of peace were noteworthy. In 1870, she called for mothers around the world to organize a crusade on behalf of peace. Hoping to establish what she called 'a mighty and august Congress of Mothers, which should constitute a new point of departure for the generation of society,' she held two well-attended meetings in New York City to publicize the cause. In 1873, she established the tradition of observing a Mothers' Day of Peace in early June. The first Mothers' Day was celebrated in eighteen American cities, as well as in Rome and Constantinople . . . .

"But even if Julia had never organized a single public activity related to peace reform, sustained reflection about pacifism would have remained critical to her intellectual development. Analyzing issues of peace and war allowed Julia to bring to fruition the theoretical notions about gender that she had begun exploring in her philosophical lectures. Through her investigation of the roots of peace, Julia discovered that God was a mother as well as a father and concluded that without the uplifting influence of women, human civilization could not pull itself out of savagery." (pp. 117-118)

SERMON

"It is a blessed thing to be a mother," wrote Julia Ward Howe to her sister Louisa, "but there are bounds to all things, and no woman is under any obligation to sacrifice the whole of her existence to the mere act of bringing children into the world. I cannot help considering the excess of this as materializing and degrading to a woman whose spiritual nature has any strength," she continued. "Men, on the contrary, think it glorification enough for a woman to be a wife and mother in any way, and upon any terms."[i]

She had been married four years. She had given birth to two children. There would be four more; one would die. Her life was wracked with conflict at home, her marriage a mess, and her attitude towards domesticity ambivalent at best. Few people knew the true story, though her resentment leaked out in writings she published without her husband's permission. She became famous for writing a song, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and its acclaim - as well as her provocative ideas - catapulted her into public life. She wanted it. Soon in demand for speeches and gatherings, Julia Ward Howe grew to be a popular icon. She even declared the first Mothers' Day as a witness for peace.

Her children complained about her frequent absences from home. Yet later they made a cottage industry of writing idealized memoirs about their family life; one book won a Pulitzer Prize. Her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, was domineering and emotionally and physically abusive towards her. The dashing humanitarian whose work with the blind broke new ground in social justice lashed out at his wife whenever she acted on her own. History hid these secrets for years.

People live with extraordinary contradictions: we all do. Families have public and private personalities. Children remember what they choose. Husbands and wives can each tell their own side of the story. The truth is always complicated.

Throughout Julia Ward Howe's long life, which spanned the years 1819 to 1910, she struggled with the contradictions in her situation. There were the compromises she made and the ones she refused to make. There was her posturing as the ideal Victorian woman, giving advice about marriage and family that she herself could not follow. But there was also her tireless working on the causes for which she is best remembered: abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and most of all, peace.

Although her husband disapproved of her writing and speaking in public, Julia was determined to keep at it. She pursued education and community through Unitarian friends - in the Radical Club, a Transcendentalist group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson; and later, with other women. She co-founded the New England Woman's Club and served as president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association. She must have been going to meetings all the time.

Her involvement in women's suffrage influenced her profoundly. Her self-esteem and confidence grew. Her spirituality blossomed. These changes - perhaps even more than her reaction to the bloodshed of the Civil War - led her to become a pacifist.

"During the first two thirds of my life," Julia recalled, "I looked to the masculine idea of character as the only true one. I sought its inspiration, and referred my merits and demerits to its judicial verdict . . . . The new domain now made clear to me was that of true womanhood - woman no longer in her ancillary relation to her opposite, man, but in her direct relation to the divine plan and purpose, as a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility. This discovery was like the addition of a new continent to the map of the world . . . ."[ii]

Julia's awakening to her true nature brought about personal reconciliation for her as a mother and as a wife. She wrote in her diary that motherhood is "the womanly power . . . that links the divine to the human soul."[iii] Such spiritual reflection led her to conclude that women had an essential and legitimate role in making peace in the world. She began to think of God as father and mother - an image that the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker introduced into worship services he led - and Julia attended.[iv]

At this point in her life - she would have been nearly fifty - even her husband wrote that she "was in the full maturity of her talent and power." Perhaps having a mistress made him more magnanimous.[v] At least he no longer challenged her every move.

When Samuel Gridley Howe died in 1876, Julia grieved and wrote his biography. He left nearly all of his estate to his children. She, however, was free to pursue her ambitions in full. And she did, from 1876 until her own death in 1910, traveling, lecturing, and bringing women together to make a better world.

Today is Mothers' Day, a day fraught with mixed feeling for most of us, if it means anything at all. I wonder what Julia Ward Howe would think about what it has become. Its awkward reminder of choices we made or did not make to be or not be mothers. Its rekindling of feelings of inadequacy among even the best of mothers. Its guilty nudging of forgetful children - well, perhaps Julia would understand. She certainly was familiar with the stresses of motherhood.

But that is not what she intended for this day at all. Her Mothers' Day proclamation of 1870 was her protest against war. She may have written the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in abolitionist fervor, but she was transformed by the violence and suffering she witnessed: The earth cries out, "Disarm, disarm," she wrote.

Somewhere along the way Mothers' Day the feminist pacifist observance she envisioned became a celebration of domestic life instead. The irony would not have been lost on Julia. She knew what it felt like to be undermined and silenced at home.

It should come as no surprise that modern day feminists such as Gloria Steinem have invoked Julia Ward Howe's proclamation as a timely one. "She created Mother's Day as a call for women all over the world," Steinem said, "to come together, and create ways of protesting war, of making a kind of alternate government that could finally do away with war as an acceptable way of solving conflict."[vi] Julia Ward Howe would have approved of Cindy Sheehan, camped out in Crawford, Texas. If she were alive today, she might have helped found CODEPINK.

And what would she think of us, women and men, each with more freedom to be ourselves than she ever enjoyed? Have we women fulfilled her hope for that "uplifting influence" so that "human civilization could . . . pull itself out of savagery?"[vii] Sad to say, I think not. The precious rights for which Julia Ward Howe campaigned may now be ours, but we have not yet voted ourselves into a peaceful world. What will it take? When will we realize that the only power we have is the power we use?

As I read the story of Julia Ward Howe's life, I became increasingly distressed by the truth of her life. She was the victim of domestic violence. She faced consequences every time she came home from a meeting, but she didn't quit. Her husband would divorce her only if she gave him the children. Refusing to do so, she struggled forward, even as her own children often sided with their father in their disapproval of her public life. Living together according to some dysfunctional pact, none of them ever revealed what was wrong.

I guess you could say she was vindicated; that she had the last word - quoted as a feminist icon and pacifist. And the truth of her life, buried in private letters and journals, many of them burned by her children, still managed to surface these past few years, reclaimed by a couple of feminist historians. The truth will set you free, if you wait long enough.

As for us, the women and men for whom Julia Ward Howe wished a better world, we have yet to take the truth of our lives - and use it to set us free. How much longer will we wait, living with the pact we have made to put our own priorities first while the suffering created by our wars drags the whole world down together? "Arise, then, women of this day!" wrote Julia Ward Howe. Let us find the "means whereby the great human family can live in peace."

==================

[i] As quoted in "Diva Julia," by Valarie H. Ziegler (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2003), p. 8.
[ii] As quoted in “Julia Ward Howe,” by Joan Goodwin for the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society at http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/.
[iii] "Diva Julia," p. 116.
[iv] Ibid., p. 116.
[v] Ibid., p. 119.
[vi] As quoted in “The Real Mother's Day Tradition,” by Katrina Vanden Heuvel in "The Nation," May 10, 2007. www.thenation.com/blogs.
[vii] "Diva Julia," p. 118.