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Julia Evelina Smith
Who was Julia Evelina Smith?
American activist, translator, author
Biographical data adapted from Wikipedia’s article on Julia Evelina Smith (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Biography
Julia Evelina Smith was born on May 27, 1792, in Glastonbury, Connecticut, to Zephaniah Hollister Smith, a Congregationalist minister, and Hannah Hadassah Jordan Smith. She was one of five daughters in a family that valued education and intellectual curiosity, which was unusual for women at the time. Julia and her sister Abby Hadassah Smith became well-known across the country for their stand against taxation without political representation in the 1870s.
Before Fame
Julia Smith grew up in Glastonbury, Connecticut, where she got an unusually thorough education for a woman in the early nineteenth century. She learned multiple languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French, which later helped with her impressive translation work. The Smith family focused heavily on religious study, and Julia's strong grasp of classical and biblical languages allowed her to take on scholarly work that was rare for men and nearly unheard of for women then. Her rise to prominence was driven by both her intellectual rigor and the political beliefs she shared with her sister Abby.
Key Achievements
- First woman to translate the Bible from its original Hebrew and Greek into English, published in 1876
- Co-led a prominent tax resistance campaign in Glastonbury, Connecticut, protesting taxation without representation for women
- Authored Abby Smith and Her Cows, a widely read account of women's suffrage activism and civic resistance
- Mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French, enabling rigorous scholarly and translation work across decades
- Became a nationally recognized figure in the women's suffrage movement through public speaking and writing in her eighties
Did You Know?
- 01.Julia Smith translated the Bible into English five times in total, believing that repeated independent translation would help her arrive at the most precise rendering of the original texts.
- 02.The Smith sisters' tax resistance protest began in 1873 when they refused to pay taxes on the grounds that they had no voting representation; Glastonbury officials seized their Alderney cows as payment, an act that generated widespread newspaper coverage.
- 03.Julia Smith published her Bible translation in 1876 at her own expense through the American Publishing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, making it the only complete Bible translation by a woman for many decades.
- 04.Julia Smith married Amos Andrew Parker, a former congressman from New Hampshire, in 1884 when she was 91 years old, making her one of the oldest first-time brides recorded in American history at the time.
- 05.Her book Abby Smith and Her Cows, published in 1877, combined a personal account of the sisters' tax resistance with a broader argument for women's suffrage, and was widely circulated among suffrage organizations.