Representation and How to Get It by Joyce Van Dyke

This program is at North Parish Unitarian at 190 Academy Rd. Actress Elaine Vaan Hogue will present her one-woman play about Julia Ward Howe. Tickets are $20 and are available at the door. “Julia is most famous today for having written the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic: “Mine eyes have seen the glory . . .” Over time, I’ve come to hear that opening phrase in her own voice, not a big choir’s. She was a political visionary, and she saw the glory that could be brought into being by taking action: the glory of world peace, the glory of women’s emancipation, the glory of racial equality, the glory of religious freedom, the glory of a society in which women and men stand “shoulder to shoulder” working to solve the nation’s problems. She didn’t just have the vision, she worked for it – right up until her death at the age of 91. Her favorite aunt once said to her: “Julia, do not allow yourself to grow old! When you feel that you cannot do a thing,get up and do it!” The list of what she wrote, published, founded, organized, lobbied for, and presided over is astonishing; the number of those she helped and inspired can’t be calculated. Note: Julia’s pencil manuscript of her talk on women and voting rights for the Boston Radical Club, titled “Representation and How to Secure It,” is in Harvard University’s Houghton Library.”