As she approached her fiftieth birthday in 1869, Howe had a vision of a new world of womanhood and endeavored to become part of it. “During the first two thirds of my life,” she recalled in her memoir, “I looked to the masculine ideal of character as the only true one. I sought its inspiration, and referred my merits and demerits to its judicial verdict. In an unexpected hour a new light came to me, showing a world of thought and of character quite beyond the limits in which I had hitherto been content to abide. 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, or of a new testament to the old ordinances.”1 Hitherto her models and mentors had been great men—her father, her husband, Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Spinoza, Kant. As she looked to women for evidence of intelligence, morality, courage, and purpose, she was strengthened and transformed.
With this revelation, Howe began to apply philosophic insights to the situation of women, and to her own life. Reasoning from women’s divinely given maternal responsibilities, she concluded that they must be the moral and spiritual equals of men. The next step was to demand for women “the full dignity of citizenship” that had been granted to the slave.2 Northern women had fought for abolition and emancipation of the slaves; now their turn had come. They “had labored incessantly to supply the needs of those at the front,” and had “worked to build, maintain, and fill the churches throughout the land with a patient industry akin to that of coral insects. Surely we should be invited to pass in with our brothers to the larger liberty now shown to be our just due.”3 Like the microscopic insects that had gradually built up the great coral reefs of the Pacific, women were the anonymous, almost invisible agents of change. They must channel that patient industry into creating a place of their own in the halls of government. And she herself must break away from the confines of Chev’s approval and become a free agent, a free woman.
Nonetheless, when she was invited to take part in an organizing meeting for women’s rights in Boston in 1868, Howe was uneasy, expecting the suffragists to be eccentric, ugly, strident, and belligerent—to embody, in short, the stereotypes of strong-minded harridans she had read in the newspapers and heard from Chev’s friends. On a wet November morning, she slipped into Horticultural Hall as inconspicuously as possible, respectably dressed in her “rainy-day suit,” and hoping to be unnoticed by the officers of the group. On the platform were men she honored and respected—William Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Thomas Higginson, and James Freeman Clarke. Also sitting on the platform, however, was the suffragist and reformer Lucy Stone, who had graduated from Oberlin College and taken the bold step of keeping her maiden name rather than combining it with her husband’s. Perhaps these signs of challenge to traditional womanly behavior antagonized Howe; perhaps she was envious. In any case, she had made Stone “the object of one of my imaginary dislikes.” Yet when Stone rose to speak, Howe was astonished; her nemesis was “sweet-faced and silver-voiced, the very embodiment of Goethe’s ‘eternal feminine.’ ” Furthermore, Stone’s views on women “harmonized with my own aspirations.”4 Suddenly Howe felt her prejudices dissolve: “The object of my distaste had been a mere Phantom, conjured up by silly and senseless misrepresentations. . . . These champions, who had fought so long and so valiantly for the slave, now turned a searchlight of their intelligence upon the condition of woman, and demanded for the mothers of the community the civil rights that had recently been accorded the negro. When they requested me to speak, which they did presently, I could only say ‘I am with you.’ ”5 On the second day of the conference, she was elected president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association.
Howe clearly presents this conference as a conversion experience, and she wrote about it explicitly in those terms. She had to exorcise the image of the suffragist as an unsexed monster and see her instead as the noble figurehead of the movement; as she sat on the platform, she recalled, “for the first time I met the monster woman suffrage face-to-face. My conversion was instant . . . I embarked then on the good ship, woman suffrage.”6 More likely, her conversion had been building for a long time, and at the conference she came out in public as a suffragist, a view she had privately held but had been unwilling to declare.7 She had told herself that women must hold back until black men had citizenship and the vote, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869 relieved her scruples. Personally, Howe had also reached a dead end in her efforts to make a career as a lecturer on philosophical ethics. She had sadly recognized in the late ’60s that her lectures on metaphysics went over the heads of her baffled audience. Reading a paper on “Ideal Causation” one night, she realized that no one was “greatly interested.”8 Finally, she herself had become wearied by a purely mental life. After another unsuccessful presentation at the Parker Fraternity Rooms, a memorial site for Theodore Parker, she told Maud that she “determined to live from experience, from thinking about people and about life, and to think no longer about thoughts.”9 The suffrage movement offered a solution to this split between mind and spirit and united all her gifts in a grand public role.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had left the Republican Party to organize a women’s party campaigning for suffrage, but their insistence on women’s entitlement to the vote brought them into a conflict with black rights, a conflict that would evolve into racism. “If intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the government,” Anthony argued in a debate, “let the question of woman be brought up first and that of the Negro last.”10 In reaction, a group of moderate New England reformers, most of them abolitionists, decided to call for a convention on “the woman question,” the genteel euphemism for feminism. The conveners of the conference avoided naming women’s suffrage as their goal, but they proposed “the equality of the sexes before God . . . And the rights of the individual as set forth in the ever memorable words of the Declaration of Independence” as their subject.
When the American Woman Suffrage Association was formed in 1869, Howe became its foreign corresponding secretary, making use of her language skills and broad European contacts to communicate with feminists abroad; she was also one of the editors of its publication, the Woman’s Journal. In the first issue, she described the cause as renewal and revitalization for middle-aged women. “We who stand beside the cradle of this enterprise are not young in years. . . . Some of us have been looking thoughtfully forward to the final summons, not because of ill health or infirmity, but because, after the establishment of our families, no great object intervened between ourselves and that last consummation. But these young undertakings detain us in life. While they need so much care and counsel, we cannot consent to death.”11
The women’s movement was especially precious to Howe because it brought her women friends. She had understood sisterhood through Louisa and Annie, and Mary Ward Dorr had remained a loyal friend in Boston. But she had never had the experience of working with intelligent women who shared her energy and values. “Words could not express the comforting instruction which has come to me in the later years of my life,” she wrote, from “the better acquaintance with my own sex.”12On the road, the suffragists taught each other, supported each other, learned from each other, and mothered each other. Howe really loved their expeditions, however uncomfortable the rooms where they slept, however cold the halls where they spoke, however indigestible the food they ate, and however hostile the audiences they had to convince.
Her closest ties were with Lucy Stone and Mary Livermore, the editor-in-chief of the Woman’s Journal. They were almost the same age, and Stone was the same height, while Livermore was tall, stout, and comforting, the maternal “dear big Livermore!” who often rescued her in an unfamiliar town.13 To Livermore, a suffragist who became “the Queen of the Platform” as a professional public speaker with the Lyceum Bureau, Howe was “the darlingest darling of all my women friends.”14On a chilly trip to Vermont with Stone and Livermore in the winter of 1870, Howe cheerfully noticed that the evergreens “were hung with icicles, which glittered like diamonds in the bright winter sun.”15 The comparison to jewels is always a sign of her happiness. When the three women got to their meeting room in Burlington, however, they found “a vulgar and silly ballad” that described them as three old crows. Howe volunteered to talk first, promising that she would not be disturbed even if the audience threw chairs at her. They did not; Mary Livermore stared them down, and Howe’s reasonable speech calmed them down. On the other hand, Vermonters were not persuaded to pass a suffrage measure. Some women who went to the meetings in Rutland, Montpelier, and Burlington found Howe out of touch with their lives and were offended when she addressed them as if they were spoiled socialites. “It touches our sense of the ludicrous,” one wrote sharply in the Vermont Watchman, “to see people coming to the hard-working women of Vermont to tell us we are dying of ennui.”16
Howe learned from that awkward experience that she had to pay more attention to class diversity and to the interests of her audience. With the help of Stone and Livermore, she was soon teaching herself to be a better public speaker. Her first task was to move up from the polite parlor discussions of Boston ladies, and the arcane intellectual debates of the Radical Club, to rowdy political gatherings where she had to master parliamentary procedure and win over a bored or unruly crowd. With a broader experience of public speaking and argument, she learned to lower and control her operatic voice, and figured out how to gauge the amount of information and persuasion an audience could tolerate. Most of all, she became aware of her own snobbery and the need to speak to a group of women on their own terms, drawing on her sense of humor as well as philosophy. For years she had been trying on her own to improve as a lecturer; at last, these experiences of trial, error, and mastery gave her a genuine sense of accomplishment and growth. She was also watching the style of the suffragists.
Maria Mitchell, professor of astronomy at Vassar, came to the Women’s Congress in 1868, and Howe noted approvingly that she wore a well-made, rich black silk dress, to which her silver curls presented a striking contrast. Then as now, the black dress was the best look for professional women, although on one visit to a girls’ school, twelve young ladies “acted in graceful dumb show the stanzas of my Battle Hymn,” four dressed all in red, four in white, and four in blue.17 Watching Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, she became aware that some husbands were devoted partners in the battle for women’s rights. As with Theodore and Lydia Parker, however, she did not notice the submerged competition and tension between the exemplary couple.18
Soon her days were filled with meetings and protests. In snow, rain, frost, dust, and heat, she went on lecture tours from Buffalo to Minneapolis, anywhere with a spare room and a church hall. She organized a woman preachers’ convention and became president of that, too. Decades ahead of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible (1895), she was thinking about women’s absence from theological doctrine. “I felt how much the masculine administration of religious doctrine had overridden us women, and I felt how partial and one-sided a view of these matters had been inculcated by men, and handed down by man-revering mothers. . . . We need to have the womanly side of religion represented.”19
Finding a community of women gave her confidence to resist the disapproval of her family. “One of the comforts which I found in the new association was the relief it afforded me from a sense of isolation and eccentricity. For years past I had felt strongly impelled to lend my voice to the convictions of my heart . . . always with the feeling that my course in doing so was held to call for apology and explanation . . . I now found a sphere of action in which this mode of expression no longer appeared singular or eccentric, but simple, natural, and, under the circumstances, inevitable.”20 Freed from the inner pressure to apologize when she followed her convictions, she bloomed, and her friends noticed the change. Higginson observed “a new brightness to her face, a new cordiality in her manner.”21
Finally, having a group of female allies and women friends helped Howe separate from her daughters as they married and left home. On December 30, 1870, Julia Romana married Michael Anagnos and went to live at the Institution for the rest of her life. In June 1871, after a long engagement, Laura married Henry Richards, an architect trained at Harvard. In November 1871, Flossy married David Prescott Hall, a young lawyer who had been her childhood sweetheart. Three down. Of the daughters, only Maud was left at home, and she was more interested in parties and dances than education and reform. Chev thoroughly disapproved of her frivolity and blamed Julia for indulging her. “Silly Mama, has not the heart to restrain her; but lets her get intoxicated, daily and nightly, by the admiration & compliments of silly men, by the fumes of fashion. Heaven grant she may not become permanently & fatally injured, in moral character.”22
Julia Romana’s marriage was a miraculous combination of compatibility, mutual need, and plain good luck; it was also an Oedipal threat to both parents. Anagnos was being groomed to take over the Institution; by 1871, he was already the “resident superintendent” and had sealed his rights to the succession by marrying into the family. His career would mirror and rival Chev’s. For Julia Romana, becoming Mrs. Anagnos was as close as she could get to marrying her father. Always shy and uncomfortable with parties and dances, she could devote herself to serving her husband and his pupils. She also snatched away her mother’s beloved Greek tutor and took her place as the First Lady of Perkins. Living in the rooms where she had been a child suited her, too; she did not have to start from scratch with a new household and could settle easily into the familiar roles and routines. Julia says almost nothing in her journal about the Anagnos household. She was in fact relieved to have her difficult and depressed oldest daughter settled and out of the house, and to cede the Doctor’s Wing to another bride; she also kept Michael as a trusted adviser. For Chev, however, the marriage of his most devoted daughter was a painful loss that he felt for the remainder of his life. Of the three married daughters, Julia missed Laura most: “Today my dearest Laura married and left me . . . This marriage cuts into my heart, taking away my pet child. Let her know, if she reads this when I am dead and gone, that she had the inside fold of my heart.”23
Howe’s first major feminist act was to launch a women’s movement for peace. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, Howe started to think about the nature of war itself. She had sanctified the battle between the States as a holy war. Now she was struck by the unholiness of war and the ways it could be avoided. “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters,” she asked, “and prevent the waste of that human life which they alone bear and know the cost?”24 She called on women to initiate a Mother’s Day for peace on June 2 every year:
Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession.25
As Julia stepped forward into the public spotlight, Chev was longing for a final knightly adventure. As usual when he was stymied or bored, he looked backwards to his glory days in Greece, and this time he yearned to become the US ambassador to Greece. Unfortunately for him, all the signs were against it; President Grant was no more amenable to naming him a diplomat than President Johnson had been. Then in the mid-1870s, his desire for a little kingdom of his own led him to become embroiled in the tawdry campaign for the annexation of Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic. Grant wanted to get control of the harbor of Samana Bay for a naval base. Backed by a group of politicians, businessmen, and land speculators, he offered a treaty of annexation to the Dominicans, with an original payment of $1.5 million, and appointed a three-man commission including Ben Wade, a radical ex-senator from Ohio; Andrew D. White, the president of Cornell; and Dr. Howe. They left for an exploratory trip to the island in 1871; Chev loved the tropical climate, was charmed by President Buenaventura Báez, and persuaded himself that the Dominicans were virtually unanimous in desiring union with the United States.
Sumner, however, thought the Dominican project was a disgraceful mixture of greed, exploitation, and imperialism. He brought all his political passion and relentless oratory to opposing the treaty of annexation in the Senate; and the project was tabled. For once, the old friends could not agree. “I cannot see anything in this business as you see it—nothing!” Sumner wrote to Chev.26 Sumner’s intransigence was the most intense challenge faced by the two friends. For decades they had fought on the same side. Chev could not accept or endure Sumner’s refusal to support him. He let off steam in a strongly worded letter to Andrew White, invoking the most extreme images of madness and betrayal: “I have been slowly & painfully led to the sad conclusion that Charles Sumner has become morally insane. The great moral influence over the public which he has gained by a noble and brilliant career, he is now wielding to gratify personal hate & envy. God help him; for he knows not what he does. Much as I love him, I have a duty now to guard the public by all my feeble powers, against the evil which this once great and good man is now doing, in his blind phrenzy . . . He has deceived and misled the public. He has vilified & abused innocent men . . . He has imperiled the acquisition of territory by the U.S. which would be a vast advantage to the country; to commerce; & to the progress of freedom & humanity …”27
Despite the setbacks, Chev was determined to go back to the island and take his family with him; he still had hopes for the Dominican project, if only as a business venture. He invested his money—or rather, Julia’s money—in the Samana Bay Company, along with a group of speculators and shipping merchants. In February 1872, he and Julia set sail on the Tybee for a rough and stormy voyage, accompanied by Maud and one of her friends; Chev’s three nieces; and his devoted secretary Mary Paddock. While Chev was courted by President Báez, Julia was entertaining the girls and enjoying the opportunity to give a lavish ball for them during Easter carnival, something they could not have afforded at home. She also gave weekly sermons in the small black church.
Early on, Chev had uneasily noticed that speculators were making their own use of the capital of the Samana Bay Company: “money was squandered prodigally on fabulous salaries, traveling expenses, and bonuses to officials who accomplished nothing.”28 Unfortunately, he stifled his doubts, and the swindle soon collapsed. The Samana Bay Company went bankrupt, and Chev was lucky to get out without losing his entire investment and paying the company’s debts as well. Writing about his adventure, though, he used the rhetoric and imagery of the knight-errant that had carried him so far: “Parts of it are like a romance. Parts read like the hopes and fears of the adventures of the pioneers of the East India Companies. Parts recall the South Seas Bubble, and parts the Spanish pursuit of Eldorado in Mexico and Peru; parts the French Buccaneers, while parts were enacted by lovers of chivalrous adventure, imitators of the noble Quixote, whose high aim ever was to redress wrongs, put down evil doers, and lift up the fallen and oppressed.”29
In April, Julia left Chev and the others behind and returned to Boston to pack for a short trip to London. She had proposed that an international Peace Congress for Women be held in London, preceded by planning meetings in New York. Now it was taking place. But the London congress was disappointing. She was snubbed by the British delegates, “as hard as billiard balls, charged with electricity . . . But I may be a little nettled by the entire neglect with which I was treated, altho I was prepared for this.”30 She also had an unpleasant encounter with Robert Browning at an afternoon reception. He was “ruder and more brutal to me than I supposed any man would have been to any woman,” she wrote in her journal. “Moral, avoid a devilish big tomcat.” Browning had been gracious and suave to her at an earlier visit to London; now, a decade after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death, he seemed ungentlemanly and rude. Julia didn’t record his words, but she did record her shock. “No American, not drunk, would treat a woman so.”31 She had underestimated the impact of her satiric poems about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s opium addiction in Words for the Hour. Obsessing about the encounter back in Boston, she was still trying to minimize his insult: “I have loved E. B. B. though I have written one crooked word about her, which, among many loving ones, seems to be the only one remembered.”32 Barrett Browning herself had shrugged off the crooked words, as she wrote to a friend: “if you could know how little I have thought of it, & how when I do consider the subject, the strongest feeling I am conscious of is pity for her & that she should have felt vexed through me.”33 Her husband was not as forgiving.
However disagreeable the Browning incident, meeting him made Howe ruminate for the next few months on the literary life she had abandoned for public life and pacifism. “When I hear literary performances praised, & remember my own love for it, & for praise, I think of all this I have sacrificed in these later years for a service which has made me enemies as well as friends. I felt called upon to do this, and I still think that if I made a mistake it was one of those honest mistakes which it is best to make.”34 Listening to Ednah Dow Cheney’s lecture on English literature at the New England Woman’s Club in October, she was pained to hear herself mentioned as a former poet: “though she pleasantly alluded to me as one who has laid aside the laurel for the olive branch, she said nothing whatever about my writings, which deserve to be spoken of in characterizing the current literature of the day.”35 Her fame as the author of the “Battle Hymn” grew every day; but giving birth to a great cultural anthem was a burden as well as an honor. The New York literary editor and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman could see how the fame of the “Battle Hymn” could also be “a Frankenstein’s monster . . . when it has become the sacred scroll of millions.” Howe knew that the glory of the “Hymn” marked the end of her career as a poet. “It was a joy to her to be associated with the ‘Battle Hymn,’ ” her daughters wrote, “yet she sometimes grieved a little because this so greatly overshadowed all her other literary productions.”36
Back home, Chev was feeling neglected and forgotten, too; one October morning he had chest pains he believed to be a heart attack and insisted they take the 7:20 a.m. train into Boston to see the doctor. Julia went with him; it was nothing serious. Once on the train home, “people congratulated him on his good looks,” and he quickly recovered.37 Being admired made him feel young, and looking young won him admiration and restored his self-confidence. At Laura’s wedding, he had worn the bright blue suit from his own wedding to Julia; he was proud that it still fit him perfectly.
• • •
In December 1872, Howe went to a meeting at the New England Woman’s Club and was annoyed when the guest speaker, Dr. Edward H. Clarke from Harvard Medical School, gave a paper “on the education of women, considered from the physical point of view. It was an argument against the coeducation of the sexes, based entirely upon the monthly indisposition if so it may be called of women.”38 According to one historian, “the clubwomen thought they had invited an ally to speak on the subject of ‘women’s fitness for entering practical life.’ Likewise, Dr. Clarke anticipated a friendly and supportive audience before whom he could unveil his new theory that higher education unfit women for motherhood and made them ill. Both sides thought wrong.”39 Clarke believed that the neglect of menstruation in youth, especially if accompanied by the intense brainwork of higher education, doomed women to a lifetime of disease and infertility. In 1873, he published Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls, which became one of the most notorious antifeminist works of the 1870s, going through seventeen editions in thirteen years and provoking furious rebuttals from women in the United States and in Europe.40
Howe joined a large group of feminists, doctors, and suffragists to refute Clarke’s claims. Fussing about “the monthly indisposition,” she wrote, was an old-fashioned holdover from the “elder generation . . . Many young women who are allowed to eat, dress, live, and behave as they like, are periodically kept from all violent exercise and fatigue, so far as the vigilance of elders can accomplish this.” The elders might even be right, but, she sarcastically noted, “the wilfullness and ingenuity of the young . . . are often more than a match for this vigilance; and a single ride on horseback, a single wetting of the feet, and indulgence in the irresistible German, may entail lifelong misery, which the maternal or friendly guardian has done all in her power to prevent.”41 In any case, Clarke’s contention “that women in America particularly neglect their health, that women violate the laws of their constitution as men cannot violate theirs, and that the love of intellectual pursuits causes them to do so, . . . is the fable out of which Dr. Clarke draws the moral that women must not go to college with men.”42
Euphemistic and impersonal though it is, this essay is nonetheless the most explicit discussion of menstruation in all of Howe’s writings, including her journals and letters. She had no problems discussing childbirth, breast-feeding, or toilet training; but like other nineteenth-century American women, she could not bring herself to write about menstruation or menopause. These do not seem to have been problems for Howe, or for her two sisters, or four daughters; at least she doesn’t mention them. Only in one reference to the “course of nature” happily relieving her fear of another pregnancy does she allude to a process that took much time and ingenuity for women to manage and conceal. Although Clarke’s book stands in women’s history as benighted and infamous, it also made it permissible for women to discuss menstruation in public, and for women doctors like Dr. Mary Jacobi to do the research to remove its stigma.
Chev was feeling tired, and in March 1873 Julia accompanied him back to Santo Domingo to see the end of the Samana Bay Company. President Báez had been overthrown, and Chev made a little speech as the flag of the company was lowered for the last time. She admired his pluck, and this time called him “the old Crusader” whose “beautiful chivalry stood in the greater contrast to the barbarism and ingratitude which dictated this act.”43 The Howes stayed on for a tropical vacation; Julia went shopping for jewelry while Chev recovered his appetite, optimism, and strength enough to go riding every morning. For a time, he was considering buying a retirement home on Samana Bay, among the palms and fruit trees; but that plan was quickly abandoned. They both realized it would be their last visit.
It was in Santo Domingo that they got the news of Sumner’s death of a heart attack in Washington on March 11. “He never seemed to me exactly a great man,” Julia wrote, “but a great place is left empty by his death.” Chev was shocked; he had known that Sumner was in poor health, but their political disagreements kept them distant. He was unable to get back to Cambridge for the funeral, where Emerson and Longfellow were among the pallbearers. Despite his grief, he could not resist criticizing Sumner’s role in blocking the Dominican annexation. Their mutual friend Francis Bird reproached him; “Alas! Alas! Alas! That before the sod is green over dear Sumner’s grave you should speak of him as ‘blinded by passion & prejudice’— . . . I have never told you . . . How dearly he loved you, & how tenderly he moaned over the change in your feelings towards him.”44 Chev apologized: “Would I were worthy of the affection which he accorded to me during so many years . . . Dear Charlie! The hope of renewed useful intercourse, makes immortality all the more desirable.”45 Now he felt truly alone.
The Howes returned to New York in April in time for their son Henry’s marriage to Fannie Gay. Despite headaches, rheumatism, and prostate problems, Chev kept up his work routines and attended Sumner’s memorial service in the Boston Music Hall at the beginning of June. In a letter to an Athens friend, George Finlay, he lamented the deaths of Horace Mann, Theodore Parker, and Sumner. “All my well beloved and intimate friends, and all have gone before me.”46
In Santo Domingo, Julia had started to feel compassion for Chev, but in Rhode Island that summer—he had sold Lawton’s Valley in 1871 and bought a new home, Oak Glen, twenty-five miles from Newport—he was not easy to live with. He swore loudly all the time, even at dinner; grumbled, fretted, and found fault with all the arrangements. He griped about Julia’s political activities in a letter to his friend George Finlay: “Mrs. Howe grows more and more absorbed in the public work ofobtaining women’s suffrage; and, like most of her co-workers, shows more zeal than discretion; and, in my opinion, does more harm by subordinating domestic duties to supposed public ones.”47 Writing to Laura, he took a jokier tone: “Mama is in high feather, and is organizing all kinds of Clubs and Associations, under the guise of advancing the cause of human progress, civilization, women’s rights, etc., etc., but with the appearance of good times at picnics, aesthetic teas, lobster salads, clam bakes, etc., which are to be taken inwardly, while the breath of eloquent exhortation is vented outwardly. Vive le suffrage quand meme!”48
Chev was working on his forty-third annual report to Perkins, an overview of his career and work there. In his final discussion of Laura Bridgman, he compared her unfavorably to Oliver Caswell and concluded that there was something abnormal about her indifference to men. She “never seems to pine for that closer relation in sympathy with one of the other sex, which ripens so naturally into real and sympathetic love between normal youth, placed in normal circumstances.”49 Even Laura had failed to live up to his expectations of feminine devotion to men.
By Christmas 1874, Julia was feeling the strain of his irritability; “If I do not soon have an interval of entire freedom from care & responsibility of any kind, the thin cords of sanity will snap.”50 During the first half of 1875, the cords of her sanity were stretched to their limits. Chev kept the furnace at Green Peace turned up high, “making the house a perfect hell of heating suffocation, abuse, and ill-humor.” She and Maud snuck down late at night, “opened the cold air flue, & the house became comfortable at once.”51 Throughout the winter, she turned to her journal for relief. “Chev dreadfully provoking. Wrote my peace festival circular, but all the time am weary to death with his coarse & irrational violence. I grieve to use those epithets, even on paper which [is] intended only for my own sight, but they are just. The lesson is, that the indulgence of self-will & temper through life will in the end make even a good & great man, & such I hold him to be, an insupportable companion.”52
By May, however, she had realized that he was in decline, and began to feel more patient with his outbursts: “A morning game of whist with Chev. Alas! I do not make sufficient allowance for the pain & weariness of the decline of life.”53 He was eating very little, taking digitalis three times a day, and napping in his chair. As he grew weaker, so did his inhibitions. She did not stop giving her talks despite his illness, and he protested by refusing her help. When she came back from an evening talk one night, he “would not let me help him to undress, & told me to go to hell. I was rather angry, in consequence, but saw that he was very feeble.”54 In her absence, Julia Romana gave him his morning massage; when Julia “wanted to rub him instead of letting Julia [Romana] do so. I went into his room & told her to leave it . . . He shook me violently, from head to foot, threatened to jump out of the open window. I have been very sad all day in consequence. . . . Poor Chev at bed time asked me to forgive his ill humor, which I was very glad to do.”55
By the end of November his temper tantrums had subsided, and he began to talk honestly to his wife. In response, Julia called him “dear Chev” again in her journal, although her accounts of these discussions suggest that he had confessed to her about his affairs. “I have had some sad revelations from dear Chev of things about some of my own sex which greatly astonish me,” she wrote. “From these I learn that women are not only sensual, but lustful, & that men are attracted, rather than shocked by this trait. The privacy of offices, or at least their remoteness from domestic visitation, is eagerly made available by these women for the vilest purposes.” Were these offices at the Institution? Was the man Dr. Howe? It is generally assumed that Chev confessed to affairs in the 1850s, but it’s hard to believe that Chev was seriously involved with another woman. He was too prudish, too sexually reserved, to have undertaken a risky escapade. Yet that initial disclosure was followed by a more explicit “sad talk” that apparently named a name and left Julia haunted by “the great injustice done me and the other’s self by a course of conduct most treacherous & worthy of reprobation. If thought has a grave, may this ghost be laid & appear no more.”56
The next day they reached a solemn reconciliation, with mutual forgiveness. Julia recorded “a most touching & comforting talk with dear Chev, in which I felt once more all the moral beauty which has been my faith & delight in him. I have solemnly sworn to him never to allude to any thing in the past which, coming up lately, has give us both pain . . . Gloria in Excelsis Deo! I have reached the bottom of these years of estrangement, in wh[ich] there has been fault & wrong on both sides, & we shall begin to rebuild our life in common.” Poignantly, she had her double bed moved into his room, “in order that we may have the comfort of being near each other in the dark & silent hours.”57 Two double beds in one room was as close as they wished to be.
The ghost of the sensual woman did not stay buried, but Julia wrestled with it. At night alone on a speaking trip to Leominster, she fantasized a confrontation with the woman she called “B.,” discussing “her ‘shameful conduct’ and the wrong done me. I wished to see her ghost more than I ever dreaded to see one. I remembered with joy that she died by inches a painful death, in poverty alleviated by the care of friends.”58 Who was B.? Louise Hall Tharp speculates that she might have been a woman named Becky mentioned in a few letters in the late 1850s. Becky had relatives who taught at the Institute and she visited there often; Julia had mentioned her in a letter to Annie: “Did I tell you of Becky’s visit? She came one PM and staid [sic] to tea and I had to send her to the cars in from Milton. Then Chev took her on to Newport and cunningly slipped off next morning, finding it not so strange that people could have enough of her. She wore her bosom too low, even for him.”59
Becky sounds like a temptress, but there could have been another B. or more than one woman. In any case, Julia determined to blame herself rather than B. or Chev. “It seemed a great comfort to have the burden of offence laid on my shoulders. Strange as it may seem, it was comparatively delightful to me to accuse myself, & to make my own sins point out the hypocrisy & unkindness of which I have had so long an experience, without in the least understanding the facts, as they were.”60
Chev had dinner with his family and friends on Christmas Day 1875 and also managed to get to Sunday dinner January 2. Two days later he had a convulsive attack and fell into a coma from which he never recovered. The family gathered around his bed; on the morning of January 9, Julia brought Laura Bridgman to his side to bid him good-bye. Her account of Laura’s final farewell was Dickensian in its emotion; “She could not see—she never had seen him, but she knew that she was in his presence for the last time. She was allowed to touch his features very softly, and a little agonized sound, scarcely audible, alone broke the silence of the solemn scene. All who were present deeply felt the significance of this farewell.”61 They may have misinterpreted that sound; Laura told Sarah Wight that she had been frightened and repelled by the touch of the Doctor’s warm, moist skin.62 On January 9, 1876, Chev died shortly after noon; the cause of death is uncertain, although a stroke, a brain tumor, or cancer have been suggested as the cause.
The next morning Julia went to his room and laid her bridal veil across his bed. She had already written her farewell poem of repentance:
A mother and grandmother,
A widow, long a wife,
I recognize the childhood
That follows me through life.
Oh! Take me yet, dear Master
Where thy disciples stand;
And set me down before them
With thy instructing hand.
Show them the faulty record,
The willful brow and face,
And tell them this offender
Is conquered by thy grace.
An entry in her journal the day after he died contains a rare misspelling: “Now, the death of my darling husband makes a new chapture [sic] for me.”63 Chapter? Capture? Picture? Closure? Departure? It was all of these. She had been married to Chev for almost thirty-three years; she would live another thirty-four. Chev’s funeral was on January 13; the next day she wrote: “Began my new life today.”
And then on January 15, Chev’s will was read. Julia had not known its contents. Sitting with the family, she learned that he had left her nothing. “My wife, Julia Ward Howe, having ample means of her own,” he wrote maliciously, would not need any legacy from him. As he knew, he had lost most of her family fortune; she had an income of about $2,000 a year. Chev’s estate was to be divided equally among the daughters; it was left to Julia to help Harry start his career. She accepted the news of her disinheritance stoically, mentioning in her journal only that everyone thought the will to be unfortunate, especially Flossy’s lawyer husband, David Hall. The will had probably been written and signed long before; he would not have had time to change it after their deathbed talk. But disinheritance sounds like a gesture of disapproval he would have enjoyed. From beyond the grave, his dead hand continued to punish Julia and attempt to exert control.
Julia also had to go through Chev’s personal papers with Michael Anagnos, who refused to let her read a number of his letters and insisted on burning them. But the letters kept on turning up all spring. She found two more from a mysterious Mrs. Motley in a locked drawer, which she burned; and another two from Sumner, which she threw in the privy. As late as July, she destroyed another letter from Sumner, “with many clauses in it which I shall never forget, the matter treated of being entirely personal.”64
Chev was honored at a grand memorial service on February 8 at the Boston Music Hall, with speeches by Boston notables and readings by poets and sages. Julia observed all the proprieties. She memorialized Chev with formal and ceremonial language, in a short pamphlet, printed in raised type for his students; her daughters stress the intended audience to excuse its brevity and obscurity. In her journal, a few entries around what would have been their anniversary describe her remorse over their estrangement: “Would to God that I had done a thousand times more for him than I ever did. I learn more deeply than ever before how happy one is in being able to make sacrifices for other people, especially for those to whom we are bound by sacred ties. I thought I made many sacrifices for dear Chev, that I now feel that I ought to have done far more.”65 But her ethical mourning for Chev, and her regret for making too few sacrifices on his behalf, could not compare with her deep sorrow and grief over Sammy’s death. Only rarely did she dream of Chev, and when she did he was scolding her.
She had to move on, and she had to make some money. Green Peace was in her name, but the taxes were so high she could not afford it, even though she rented it out and moved to Oak Glen with Maud. The Christmas after Chev’s death, she was lecturing in Chicago. Then in the New Year, having made enough money to pay her bills, Julia unexpectedly decided to take Maud on a Grand Tour of Europe. Maud had been left behind on other trips and had been lonely and envious of her sisters; she was flirtatious and unsettled, and needed a good dose of European culture. In her journal, Julia was explicit that “my European tour was undertaken for dear Maud’s sake. It took me away from the dear ones at home, and from opportunities of work which I should have prized highly.” If she had stayed at home in Boston, she would have been president of the Women’s Congress.66
Yet there were obvious advantages for Julia in getting away from Boston and starting her new life. This time she would plan the itinerary and set the pace. In the event, the trip lasted over two years, from May 1877 to July 1879; they saw everything, met everyone, and went everywhere. In London, Maud was considered a great beauty and went joyfully to dinners, dances, garden parties, cricket matches, football matches, boat races, horse races, and “shows of pictures, flowers, vegetables, dogs.”67 Julia meanwhile gave talks, went to meetings—including some on antivivisection—and was escorted about by Henry James, whom Maud suspected of using her as a model for American girls abroad.68 Julia and Maud encountered Robert Browning at a dinner party; Maud described him as a ridiculous sixty-five-year-old dandy, with a waxed mustache, a monocle, and an epicurean air. At the dinner table, he bragged that he knew the specialties of the house and would help her choose the best plats. She was more impressed by the Pre-Raphaelites and the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery. “The aesthetic movement was at its height, and the ‘shorthaired women and long-haired men,’ familiar figures at all the great . . . public fetes, waited to see the entrance one of the ‘beauties,’ as people wait to see Royalty pass.” They went to the opening reception of the Royal Academy, where Maud’s escort for the evening, fatefully, was a young Scottish artist named John Elliott.69
Julia and Maud kept up a terrific pace and covered the map of Europe: Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France. In Geneva they attended a conference organized by Josephine Butler to protest the lowering of the age of consent in England. They visited museums, galleries, cathedrals, monuments, exhibitions, art schools, and studios. In Rome, they stayed in the vast and magnificent Palazzo Odescalchi, the home of Louisa, and were escorted by her handsome son, Francis Crawford. There Maud began to study painting with an Italian landscape artist. But the lessons had to stop in February 1878 when she came down with Roman fever, a form of malaria to which tourists were susceptible. Henry James wrote about it inDaisy Miller, published the following summer, in which an American girl in Rome is exposed to the fever and dies; it is possible that he had been studying Maud in London. Edith Wharton’s short story “Roman Fever” (1934) makes it a metaphor for illicit sexuality. The fever is momentous for these heroines, and it turned out to be so for Maud as well. In its aftermath, she found the most creative, and interesting, if the most elusive, unconventional, and intransigent, of the Howe daughters’husbands.
To recuperate, the Howes spent May at the Hotel Brufani in Perugia, where Maud again met John Elliott, her Royal Academy escort. Accompanied by a close older friend, Edward Shakerly Kemp, he was returning to England after studying in Rome. Three years younger than Maud, orphaned and penniless, Jack Elliott was a handsome, probably bisexual aesthete who loved the theatre, flowers, furniture, interior décor, and fashion. Maud was smitten. She described him to Laura as “a graceful beautiful creature, like a Donatello . . . He has wonderful deep hazel eyes and massive black wavy hair, a big beautiful mouth just in the shape of a Cupids bow, filled with white teeth.”70 Jack was smitten, too. He decided to stay on the Continent, and he wound up traveling with them, helpfully attentive to Julia and a great companion for both the Howes. In Quimper, he designed a lace cap for Julia, based on the Breton costume, with a peak and flowing side panels, which would become a much-remarked signature item in her lecture wardrobe and portraits.
After a year, the other daughters thought Maud and Mama had done enough gallivanting; it was time to come back and take care of them. Flossy and Laura, dealing with growing families on limited funds, were envious of Maud’s monopoly of their mother and the pleasures she was enjoying; Julia Romana was more caustic about “our troubadour Ma” and “the Empress Maud.” The Empress or the Duchess became family shorthand for Maud.71 The sisters also developed a jocular but negative vocabulary for Howe’s hectic travel: gadding about, flapping her wings, hoppings and leppings. Addressing their resentment, describing her own dependent circumstances, and pointing out Flossy’s poverty, Maud wrote candidly to Laura explaining why they were staying on:
About our coming home, or rather our not coming home. I am sorry that you and Flossy are so much troubled about it. But I think mama must have told you, that she made the decision, without any pressure on my part… She is very anxious to go to Egypt and she would have gone this winter I think, had it not been for my illness—you know how quickly she adapts herself to new surroundings—she has enjoyed everything as fully as much, and I sometimes think more than I have. Her energy and enthusiasm are unlimited. We should come home in the autumn—well, what then—mama would not have wished to leave Boston, and yet how would we have lived there, on the little that we have to live on. . . . Julia’s doors, or rather her husband’s, have never been open to me, and poor dear Floss cannot give me the hospitality she would like to—what remains then—a couple of rooms over the club, and in Boston, which of all places in the world, I detest—rather a gloomy prospect.72
The second year of their trip took them to the Middle East, most of it new territory for Julia. From Italy and France they headed to Egypt, meeting princesses in Cairo, cruising up the Nile to celebrate the New Year of 1879, and heading on to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jaffa, Cyprus, and Athens. When they returned to Boston in July 1879, Maud had acquired a life-changing knowledge of art, had formed a desire to gain recognition for American art among the classics of the world, and had met the man she would marry. Julia was $3,500 in debt.