A Mother's Day proclamation: Peace
More than 150 million greeting cards will be opened today and 1-800 Flowers will deliver nearly 5 million blooming buds. Mother's Day, says a company spokesman, is the online florist's busiest holiday of the year. But the roots of Mother's Day are far less commercial -- and far more radical.
In 1870, with the country still raw from the horror of the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe, a feminist, pacifist, poet and mother of six from Boston, wrote a fiery call for peace she dubbed the Mother's Day Proclamation. It was an attempt to answer her own question: "Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?"
Howe was no stranger to activism -- she wrote the famous Union rallying cry "Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- and she hoped her proclamation would unite mothers around the world in the cause of peace.
In 1914, 44 years after the proclamation was written (and four years after Howe's death), President Woodrow Wilson declared Mother's Day a national holiday. In the Mother's Day History section of the 1-800 Flowers Web site, Howe's name is nowhere to be found.
Mother Day Proclamation
"We will not have great questions decided 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 bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
Howe was no stranger to activism -- she wrote the famous Union rallying cry "Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- and she hoped her proclamation would unite mothers around the world in the cause of peace.
In 1914, 44 years after the proclamation was written (and four years after Howe's death), President Woodrow Wilson declared Mother's Day a national holiday. In the Mother's Day History section of the 1-800 Flowers Web site, Howe's name is nowhere to be found.
Mother Day Proclamation
"We will not have great questions decided 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 bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
LINK: mothersactingup.org
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