Sometimes as a mom, it feels like I carry the world on my shoulders. I know from talking to other moms that I’m not unique. Not only are we constantly tuned into the survival and well-being of our own children, but we are also very much in-tune with the well-being of the rest of humanity and the natural world that sustains us all. That’s a lot to carry!
The act of carrying and sustaining a life inside us for 9 months (or going through the process of adoption); of pouring selfless love into that person, night and day for years and then slowly releasing that person to walk their own path in the wider world is what I would call revolutionary love! No wonder we care so much about what kind of wider world we’re sending our children into. Give us flowers (and a trip to the spa)…...but also give us peace! Give us ceasefire!
Several revolutionary women are part of the origin story of Mother’s Day. In 1858 Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian mother, organized “Mother’s Work Days” to improve sanitation and reduce deaths from disease-bearing insects and polluted water. Later, during the Civil War she organized women’s brigades, asking her workers to assist all soldiers regardless of which side they fought on. And, in 1868, she worked to heal rifts between her Confederate and Union neighbors.
Her daughter, also named Ann, campaigned tirelessly to honor her deceased mother’s lifelong work and activism, succeeding in 1914 when Congress passed a Mother’s Day resolution. Another woman, Julia Ward Howe, a poet, peace activist and women’s suffragist established a special day for mothers and for peace in 1872 in response to the bloody Franco-Prussian War, as well as the U.S. Civil War......a radical shift, considering that earlier in her life she had written the lyrics of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
According to womenshistoryalliance.org:
The cause of world peace was the impetus for Julia Ward Howe’s establishment, over a century ago, of a special day for mothers. Following unsuccessful efforts to pull together an international pacifist conference after the Franco-Prussian War, Howe began to think of a global appeal to women.
“While the war was still in progress,” she wrote, she keenly felt the “cruel and unnecessary character of the contest.” She believed, as any woman might, that it could have been settled without bloodshed. And, she wondered, “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’s version of Mother’s Day, which served as an occasion for advocating peace, was held successfully in Boston and elsewhere for several years, but eventually lost popularity and disappeared from public notice in the years preceding World War I.*
Julia Ward Howe's Mothers Day Proclamation written in 1870:
Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of 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 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.”
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does 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 and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, 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.
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