Born on August 15, 1841, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Julia Tutwiler grew up there and in nearby Havana. She attended a school operated by her father, a member of the first graduating class at the University of Virginia and an educator of strongly liberal views. Later she attended Madame Maroteau╒s boarding school in Philadelphia for two years. During the Civil War she taught in her father╒s school. After a semester at Vassar College in 1866 she resumed teaching in Alabama. In 1872╨1873 she studied Greek and Latin privately with professors at Washington and Lee University, and in the latter year she began a three-year period of study in Germany and France. Her studies at the Deaconesses╒ Institute in Kaiserswerth, Germany, contributed to her decision to devote herself to teaching. On her return to the United States in 1876 she joined the faculty of the Tuscaloosa Female College, where she taught modern languages and English literature for five years.
In 1881 she was named co-principal of the Livingston Female Academy in Livingston, Alabama. In 1882, largely at her urging, the Alabama legislature voted an appropriation that made possible the establishment in February 1883 of the Alabama Normal College for Girls as a department of the Livingston Academy, which shortly became known as Livingston Normal College (now Livingston University). In 1890 Tutwiler became sole principal; her title was later changed to president. In 1891 she was elected president of the elementary education department of the National Education Association.
After a long campaign of public education and legislative lobbying, dating from her observation of vocational education techniques in France while visiting the Paris Exposition of 1878 as representative of the National Journal of Education, Tutwiler finally won state support for an Alabama Girls Industrial School (later Alabama College), which opened in Montevallo in October 1896. She declined the presidency of that school. She was also responsible for securing the admission of women to the University of Alabama. Another abiding interest of hers was prison reform.
In 1880 she formed the Tuscaloosa Benevolent Association to work toward that end. A statewide examination of county jails by questionnaire induced the legislature to make improvements. Some years later she became state chairman of prison and jail work for the Woman╒s Christian Temperance Union. She worked for the adoption of such penal practices as classification of offenders and state inspection of jails and prisons, and she succeeded in having a pioneering prison school established, but she failed in her campaign to abolish the convict lease system. She retired as president of Livingston Normal College in 1910. She died in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 24, 1916. Her poem ╥Alabama,╙ written in 1873 in Germany, was later adopted as the state song.
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