Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) moved to an apartment at this site in 1879 a few years after the death of her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe. During this period she served as president of the Massachusetts and New England Suffrage Associations and worked on the national level to negotiate the reunion of the two branches of the suffrage association that split in 1860 over the 15th Amendment. Active in the women’s club movement, she was a long time president of the New England Women’s Club and helped found the Association for the Advancement of Women and the newer General Federation of Women’s Clubs. In 1908, Howe was the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. By the time of her death, she was revered as a Boston institution. Hundreds of people were turned away at her memorial service in Symphony Hall where four thousand people joined in singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the hymn she wrote fifty years before.
