The roots of Mother's Day

Long before Mother's Day was a Hallmark card holiday, Julia Ward Howe suggested a day in which mothers stand together to proclaim peace.

In my work throughout the years as commmentator about motherhood issues, I have often highlighted her proclamation.

Mother's Day is this Sunday, May 11.

Julia Ward Howe had six children. It was 1870 when she wrote "The Mother's Day Proclamation for Peace."

Howe is the author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." She and her husband were friends with Abraham Lincoln. Together the three of them walked in a Civil War battlefield, still strewn with dead soldiers. As the Franco-Prussian War was beginning, Howe asked that women gather immediately to promote peace. She called her event "A Mother's Day for Peace."

On a Sunday in May in 1870 in a crowded assembly hall in Boston, Massachusetts, Julia Ward Howe read her proclamation.

Here it is:

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be that of water or
of tears!

Say firmly:

We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies.
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage,
for caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country
will be too tender of those of another country
to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.

It says, "Disarm, Disarm!"

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of
war, let women now leave all that may be left of home
for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
whereby the great human family can live in peace,
each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God--

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a
general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and
and held at some place deemed most convenient
and at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
to promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
the amicable settlement of international questions,
the great and general interests of peace--

--Julia Ward Howe / Writer, Lecturer, Reformer / Boston 1870

Here here. May we revisit this every Mother's day. Happy Mother's Day Nanci and see you next MayDay