- Mother’s Day as Pacifist Action?

Alexander Carpenter writes about the origins of Mum’s Day on the Beatitudes Society blog:

Did you know that Mother’s Day started as an antiwar proclamation?

As Dibgy writes:

It’s unfashionable and vaguely unpatriotic these days to talk about “peace” but back in 1870, it was a pretty compelling concept. As the country was still reeling from the effects of the civil war and still dealt daily with its consequent illness, poverty, injury and death, feminist Julia Ward Howe wrote the following proclamation creating a Mother’s Day convention and a demand for “the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” How quaint.




Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870
by Julia Ward Howe

 

Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will 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, the 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 voice of a 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 our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough 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 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 Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And 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.