Julia Ward Howe's story is a reminder that history remembers a person's life incompletely. "Women's history" can be an act of remembering -- in the literal sense of re-membering, putting the parts of the body, the members, back together.

The whole story of Julia Ward Howe has not even now, I think, been told. Most versions ignore her troubled marriage, as she and her husband struggled with traditional understandings of the wife's role and her own personality and personal struggle to find herself and her voice in the shadow of her famous husband.

I'm left with questions to which I cannot find answers. Was Julia Ward Howe's aversion to the song about John Brown's body based on an anger that her husband had spent part of her inheritance secretly on that cause, without her consent or support? Or did she have a role in that decision? Or was Samuel, with or without Julia, part of the Secret Six? We don't know, and may never know.

Julia Ward Howe lived the last half of her life in the public eye primarily because of one poem written in the few hours of one gray morning. In those later years, she used her fame to promote her very different later ventures, even while she resented that she was already remembered primarily for that one small accomplishment.

What is most important to the writers of history may not be necessarily the most important to those who are the subject of that history. Whether it was her peace proposals and her proposed Mother's Day, or her work on winning the vote for women -- none of which were accomplished during her lifetime -- these fade in most histories beside her writing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

This is why women's history often has a commitment to biography -- to recover, to re-member the lives of the women whose accomplishments may mean something quite different to the culture of their times than they did to the woman herself. And, in so remembering, to respect their efforts to change their own lives and even the world.

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Text copyright 1999-2007 © Jone Johnson Lewis.