Julia Ward Howe
by Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott
Summary
Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott, two of Julia Ward Howe's six children, built this joint biography of their mother's long public life, and a third sister, Florence Howe Hall, contributed to the project as well. The book follows Howe from her privileged New York girlhood through her difficult marriage to the reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, who disapproved of her writing and did what he could to discourage it, into the night in November 1861 when a friend's suggestion sent her to a Washington hotel desk to set new words to the tune of John Brown's Body. Published the following February in the Atlantic Monthly, those words became the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and the sisters treat that single night as the hinge their mother's life turns on, the moment a poet largely confined to private grief found a public voice the whole country would sing.
The book then follows Howe past the war and into the decades that made her a public figure in her own right once her husband's 1876 death freed her for the platform: her leadership of the American Woman Suffrage Association alongside Lucy Stone, her editorship of the Woman's Journal, and her later turn toward pacifism, including the 1872 appeal to women worldwide that later generations came to call her Mothers Day Proclamation. Written by daughters who had access to family letters and journals no outside biographer could have matched, the book reads as an intimate portrait built from the inside, more interested in the woman behind the reformer than in a formal accounting of her public offices.
Reading it means accepting a family memoir's warmth and its limits together, since Richards and Elliott are not disinterested observers of their own mother, and the book suits a reader drawn to Howe's era of reform as much as to Howe herself, abolition, suffrage, and peace activism unfolding across one long American life. It runs at a measured pace built from personal reminiscence and quoted letters rather than dramatic incident, closer to a tribute assembled by people who loved their subject than to an argument about her.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave its first ever biography prize in 1917 to this joint life of Julia Ward Howe, written by daughters honoring a mother who had died seven years earlier. It set an unusual precedent for the young award, since the first winner was not the work of a professional historian but a family project drawing on private letters and shared memory, a choice that said as much about what the board valued that year as any citation could.
Richards went on to a long career of her own writing children's books and popular biography, publishing more than ninety volumes over her lifetime, while Elliott continued writing as well, and neither sister repeated the collaboration that had opened the prize's history. The biography has been largely superseded since by later, more scholarly studies of Howe's life and reform career, but it remains notable as the first Pulitzer ever given for biography and as a rare instance of a prize winning life written entirely within the subject's own family.