Julia Ward Howe moved to this site in 1879, a few years after her husband Samuel Gridley Howe’s death. She served as president of the Massachusetts and New England Suffrage Associations, working to reunite the split branches of the national suffrage association. Active in the women’s club movement, Howe was president of the New England Women’s Club and helped found the Association for the Advancement of Women and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. In 1908, she became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At her memorial service in Symphony Hall, four thousand people sang her famous hymn, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
