But working for peace was also not the accomplishment which eventually meant the most to Julia Ward Howe. In the aftermath of the Civil War, she, like many before her, began to see parallels between struggles for legal rights for blacks and the need for legal equality for women. She became active in the movement to gain the vote for women.

T. W. Higginson wrote of her changed attitude as she finally discovered that she was not so alone in her ideas that women should be able to speak their minds and influence the direction of society: "From the moment when she came forward in the Woman Suffrage Movement ... there was a visible change; it gave a new brightness to her face, a new cordiality in her manner, made her calmer, firmer; she found herself among new friends and could disregard old critics."

By 1868, Julia Ward Howe was helping to found the New England Suffrage Association. In 1869 she led, with her colleague Lucy Stone, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) as the suffragists split into two camps over black versus woman suffrage and over state versus federal focus in legislating change. She began to lecture and write frequently on the subject of woman suffrage.

In 1870 she helped Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, found the Woman's Journal, remaining with the journal as an editor and writers for twenty years.

She pulled together a series of essays by writers of the time, disputing theories that held that women were inferior to men and required separate education. This defense of women's rights and education appeared in 1974 as Sex and Education.

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