Julia Ward Howe

Author: Julia Ann Flora
Publisher: CBE International

In his book, Women Composers and Hymnists, Gene Claghorn lists 356 women hymn text writers who are North American. A few of the most outstanding are Julia Ward Howe (“Battle Hymn of the Republic”), Annie Sherwood Hawks (“I Need Thee Every Hour”), Mary Ann Thomson (“O Zion Haste”), Katherine Lee Bates (“America, the Beautiful”), Mary Lathbury (“Break Thou the Bread of Life”), and Margaret Clarkson (“So Send I You”).

This essay suggests a queer reading of the poem “My Japanese Fan” by American children’s writer Laura Richards. Published in 1890, the poem stands out as conspicuously queer even today. While describing a Japanese figure of ambiguous gender, the poem outlines for its young readers terms for defining sexual identity that lie outside mainstream binary thinking; that it does so without any attempt at establishing gender hierarchy is remarkable. In so doing, the poem destabilizes clearly demarcated, binary notions of sex and gender in favour of indeterminacy and ambivalence, characteristics that inform queer theory. Thus, the poem complicates traditional views of sexuality in Victorian America, and joins a significant body of Richards’s resistant poetry, further demonstrating the subversive potential of children’s literature. The following discussion offers a close and contextual reading of the poem and attempts to account both for its positive portraiture of gender queerness in the Victorian nursery, as well as for its invisibility in criticism before now.

This essay suggests a queer reading of the poem “My Japanese Fan” by American children’s writer Laura Richards. Published in 1890, the poem stands out as conspicuously queer even today. While describing a Japanese figure of ambiguous gender, the poem outlines for its young readers terms for defining sexual identity that lie outside mainstream binary thinking; that it does so without any attempt at establishing gender hierarchy is remarkable. In so doing, the poem destabilizes clearly demarcated, binary notions of sex and gender in favour of indeterminacy and ambivalence, characteristics that inform queer theory. Thus, the poem complicates traditional views of sexuality in Victorian America, and joins a significant body of Richards’s resistant poetry, further demonstrating the subversive potential of children’s literature. The following discussion offers a close and contextual reading of the poem and attempts to account both for its positive portraiture of gender queerness in the Victorian nursery, as well as for its invisibility in criticism before now.

Julia Ward Howe, author of the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” remains known as a poet, abolitionist, and founding member of the antiracist organization American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), but her work on political philosophy and her foundational sense of the necessity for justice and suffrage for all without exception are still unexplored. Howe's speech, “The Position of Women in Plato's Republic” provides a window into the philosophy that shaped the second half of her life and her political organizing. Howe explores problems feminist scholars have often had with Socrates's plans to educate and enfranchise women of the ruling class, analyzes the rhetoric behind Socrates's successful persuasion of reluctant interlocutors, and transforms Plato's arguments into overwhelming rhetorical support for universal suffrage. Howe's intellectual conversion to the cause of suffrage, which occurred later in life and after her support for the 15th Amendment, comes into focus as she wrestles with the questions fundamental to her change of heart: women's moral relationship to human excellence, whether suffrage would destabilize family life, the relationship of gender to divine genderless unity, and the relationship of the Platonic principle of the Good to practical political policy.