[Peace-discuss] Mothers Day for Peace

[Sandra Ahten]

THE TRUE ORIGIN OF MOTHERS DAY (FOR PEACE)

Suppose Hallmark used the full name of the holiday -- "Mother's Day for
Peace?"  Hmmm...  would THAT fit into the commercialism paradigm of today?

Mother's Day was begun by Julia Ward Howe in 1872 as an anti-war
holiday.  Julia Howe, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, saw
some of the worst effects of the Civil War -- not only the death and
disease which killed and maimed the soldiers.  She worked with the widows
and orphans of soldiers on both sides of the war, and realized that the
effects of the war go beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. She also
saw the economic devastation of the Civil War, the economic crises that
followed the war, the restructuring of the economies of both North and
South.  Distressed by her experience of the realities of war, determined
that peace was one of the
two most important causes of the world (the other being equality in its
many forms) and seeing war arise again in the world in the Franco-Prussian
War, she called in 1870 for women to rise up and oppose war in all its
forms.  She wanted women to come together across national lines, to
recognize what we hold in common above what divides us, and commit to
finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts.  She issued a Declaration hoping
to gather together women in a congress of action.  In 1872 women in 18
cities in the US held a Mother's Day for Peace gathering.

Here's the full text of what Howe wrote:

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.