Julia Ward Howe

HOWE, Julia Ward (née Ward). b. New York, 27 May 1819; d. Portsmouth, Rhode Island, 17 October 1910. She was the daughter of a wealthy and respected New York banker. In 1843 she married Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876), founder of the Perkins School for the Blind at Watertown, Boston, Massachusetts. Howe, who was much older than Julia, had old-fashioned views about the place of women in marriage, and she was repressed and unhappy, partly because her husband was bisexual and unfaithful. Her feelings about his conduct towards men and women were explored in an astonishing book, The Hermaphrodite, written in the early years of the marriage, but not published until 2004. She escaped to Rome in...