The Mother of Mother's Day

Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1819 — October 17, 1910)
Mother of Mother's Day

Although I plan to honor the various mothers who have graced my life this Mother's Day, I'm beginning to recognize that one of my pet peeves is seeing how often our holidays have morphed into highly commercialized social events that seem to be completely divorced from their historical roots as powerful celebrations of the human spirit.

I've already Rambled On about Labor Day here.  At some point I'm probably going to rant about Martin Luther King's Birthday and the pervasive whitewashing of his views on war and economic justice in a capitalist society by the mainstream media each year.  And don't even get me started about the Birthday of the Prince of Peace and the Annual Blue-Gray All Star Classic college football game with Blue Angel fly-overs.  (I'm gonna take some long, slow breaths and sit still for a few moments before I continue. LOL)......

So, here's the deal on Mother's Day:
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Although the official celebration of Mother's Day in the US can be traced to Anna Jarvis's successful campaign* to make it an official holiday, forty-five years before that, in 1870, Julia Ward Howe had penned a Mother's Day Proclamation in her call for an international woman's peace congress.  A foremost social activist, suffragette and abolitionist; poet and author Julia Ward Howe had been the lyricist of the fervently militaristic The Battle Hymn of the Republic at the beginning of the Civil War.  She then experienced such horror at the carnage unleashed by that "terrible swift sword" that she became a lifelong proponent of universal disarmament.  Although unsuccessful in her efforts to make Mother's Day for Peace a national holiday, she remained a foremost feminist and peace activist and was the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her poetry, books (including a biography of Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller) and essays on women in society. 

It is ironic that Mother's Day, stripped of any political or pacifist connotations was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in the send-up to America's entry into WWI.  Our history books don't often allude to the powerful anti-war sentiment that existed in the US at that point in history.  A speech by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin in 1917 two days after Wilson's call for war claimed that the war had little popular support--and included data from a referendum in his home state showing overwhelming opposition.  Here's a popular song from that era that reflected the mood of many.  I wish that Julia Ward Howe would have lived long enough to "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier" become a hit in 1914. She died at age 91, in 1910.

* Within five years of it's becoming a national holiday, Jarvis was already decrying the commercialization of Mother's Day by the powerful advertising industry.

Here's the full text of Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation:

Mother's Day Proclamation
by Julia Ward Howe, 1870

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great 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 taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another 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 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 & commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesars 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 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.



Originally Posted Mother's Day 2013. Revised.