Debra H. Sowell Honors Humanities Lecture

Featuring Professor Ariel Silver of SVU, “Trying to Wake the World”: The Global Peacemaking Crusade of Julia Ward Howe

“In the wake of the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe, the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” transforms her cry for national justice into a call for international peace. Amid the loss of more than half a million lives, Howe has buried her own son and knows the sting of death. She turns the “fateful lighting of His terrible swift sword” into a plowshare when she organizes a world-wide protest of women against the cruelties of war, which includes the American Indians Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, and other global conflicts in her lifetime. Her desire to exchange spears for pruninghooks is grounded in a campaign that brings together philosophical and religious strains, proposing peace as a rational antidote to worldly ills and a Christian ideal. She believes that women, especially mothers, are in a unique position to stop the waste of human life because they understand its cost. She becomes the “Women’s Apostolate of Peace,” speaking in public across Europe and America, when she is shut out from the male-dominated peace movement. Her crusade to teach others to “learn war no more” (Isaiah 2:4) comes to involve advocacy not only for global conflict resolution, but also for education and the franchise for women. In trying to wake the world to “their sacred rights and duties to protect human life from the frightful ravages of war,” she also awakens American society to the many ways in which women can elevate human culture.”