Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1819 - October 17, 1910) was an American abolitionist, social activist, and poet. In 1843 she married Samuel Gridley Howe, a physician and reformer who founded the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts. She was inspired to write "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" after she met Abraham Lincoln at the White House in November 1861. It was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. It quickly became one of the most popular songs of the Union during the American Civil War. After the war she focused her activities on the causes of pacifism and women's suffrage. In 1869, she became co-leader with Lucy Stone of the American Woman Suffrage Association. She was the founder and from 1876-97 president of the Association of American Women, which advocated for women's education. In 1908 Howe became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died of pneumonia in 1910, at the age of 91. After her death, her children collaborated on a biography, published in 1916. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. She was inducted posthumously into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.