Down in Washington, D.C. a group of mothers has gotten together for a weekend of rallies, concerts, teach-ins, workshops, and other efforts to "reclaim Mother's Day as a day to work for peace."
Reclaim? Work for peace? How can this be?
Let's take a look at the beginnings of Mother's Day.
Poet Julia Ward Howe, known best for penning "Battle Hymn of the Republic," turned to women's rights late in her life. Living through the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, she was keenly aware of the devastation, death, and disease brought on by war. There were economic effects, for example, that went beyond bodies on a battlefield.
Around the same time another woman, Anna Jarvis, was working to improve unsanitary conditions and poor North-South relations after the Civil War. She had the idea to initiate Mothers' Work Days.
Aware of the work days, Howe wrote the following call for women to rise up and work for peace, attempting (and failing) to get a Mother's Day for Peace recognized.
Here is her declaration:
...............
Julia Ward Howe
Mother's Day Proclamation - 1870
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.
......
Not your typical Hallmark greeting card.
Jarvis's daughter continued the effort by trying to get a memorial day for women, starting with a Mother's Day in West Virginia where her own mother had taught Sunday School. This gradually caught on with other locations, and by 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day, just 44 years after Howe's poem.
What can you do to help Code Pink refocus Mother's Day on its original aims? They have a campaign to write letters to Laura Bush, mother to mother, asking how she can continue to support a war that is leaving scores of American and Iraqi mothers bereft. You can send your letters to laurabush@codepinkalert.org. They'll deliver them en masse and pick the best for an upcoming book.
Or, take a moment to consider the mothers who will not be seeing their sons or daughters ever again because 136 years after Howe's call to action, war is being waged and children are dying.
Or, take time to remember the 58 U.S. women soldiers who have been killed in Iraq as a result of this war. Or the hundred's injured. And the thousands of Iraqi mother's and children who no longer have loved ones, limbs, homes, or health.
Make Julia Ward Howe proud. And give your mom a hug.