To commemorate the upcoming hundredth anniversary of the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, Independent Women’s Forum will profile a leader of the fight for women’s suffrage each month.

America’s suffrage leaders were women who recognized that the right to vote is essential to any meaningful form of citizenship. The 19th Amendment was ratified August 18, 1920.

Julia Ward Howe may be best remembered as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but she was also a leading suffragist of her day. According to a biography by her daughters, Howe at first was not supportive of the cause of women’s suffrage.

Attendance at a woman’s suffrage gathering at which many of her abolitionist associates were present changed that. Her daughters describe the turning point: “These men and women had been the champions of the slave. They now asked for wives and mothers those civil rights which had been given to the negro; ‘that impartial justice for which, if for anything, a Republican Government should stand.’ Their speech was earnest; [Julia Ward Howe] listened as to a new gospel. When she was asked to speak, she could only say, ‘I am with you.’”

When the suffragist movement split in 1869 over the over ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed suffrage to former slaves but not women, Howe joined forces with the moderates, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and others who were willing to embrace the Fifteenth Amendment, despite the flaw.

Known as “the Dearest Old Lady in America” at the time of her death, Julia Ward Howe had provided the suffrage movement an alternative to the more radical element that developed in the fight over the Fifteenth Amendment and was therefore instrumental in the eventual passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

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Sincerely,

Charlotte Hays
Cultural Director
Independent Women's Forum
Independent Women's Forum
4 Weems Lane, #312
Winchester, VA 22601

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