Mother’s Day was founded as a call for
peace. Julia Ward Howe, who also wrote the Battle Hymn
of the Republic” wrote the call for women to drop
everything to work for peace in 1870.
Julia Ward Howe: Beyond the Battle Hymn of the Republic-Mother’s Day and Peace
Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870
THE GREAT AND GENERAL INTERESTS OF PEACE
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 bosom 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 out 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.
THE GREAT AND GENERAL INTERESTS OF PEACE
We’ve got some Mothers Day actions and events coming up.
I’ve told my kids, same as last year, that Mother’s Day is about anti-war. Not to buy me a thing.
This year… I could very well be in jail on Mother’s Day. Lovely huh? 🙁
in my heart. It is so quiet there sometimes I almost want to shout to end the silence, but some kind of spherical profound learning is taking place there. I miss my Uncle terribly and being around most of the Vietnam Vets who showed up at Crawford literally pierced my heart with their presence because they had managed to survive Vietnam and they carried within some kind of a depth in their soul that I had not experienced since losing him……and I never knew what it was behind that wallop of love and generosity that exploded out of him. I thought that he was born that way but now I know that surviving Vietnam and learning to live again was a lot of it. I wished that he had braved meeting more of his kind so that he would have had something to cling to and a shoulder to wail against in a very very private moment, that none of the rest of us would have been allowed to be present at, as this nation DID IT AGAIN! But it was not meant to be. I have heard angry suicide survivors talk about how when our loved ones leave us like that they just dump all of their shit on us….and yes they do. For me though it was more like a passing of a torch I had no idea he even possessed or was about to pass to me. Who am I? This weeping grieving niece for the only real father figure she had and this soldiers wife and this mother of new life loving the next generation as they grow to take our places. I walk into this very quiet mostly unoccupied space using my torch that was passed to me to light my way. Who will I become when my learning is done? Keep on keepin on here! I go and I learn and I’m very quiet going to this place because I can’t learn anything if I’m not listening and removing all of my walls so that I can take all of it in! I have not learned enough to have much say yet either. It is my husband’s birthday today….I leave this quiet right now to go make a cake.