Mother's Day for Peace

Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910)

Mother’s Day in the United States began as a peace day.

Following the Civil War groups of mothers of Confederate and Union soldiers met together for consolation. Anna Reeves Jarvis held a Mother’s Friendship Day to reunite families that had been divided during the war and she hoped that Mother’s Day would become an annual occurrence. Her daughter, Anna M. Jarvis, worked for a national Mother’s Day to honor both her mother and peace.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe wrote the first Mother’s Day Proclamation. Earlier she had written the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but she became outraged at the carnage of both the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. She called for a summit of mothers for the promotion of peace.

She wrote in part:

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.
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.

Julia Ward Howe was a writer, a social activist, and and an active Unitarian, including being a preacher in that denomination. Her Mother’s Day Proclamation is included in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition.

I urge mothers and those who have or have had mothers to give a thought to peace and the lack of peace. I urge the good people of this country to give a thought to peace in and for the United States and the world and to the policies of the United States toward that peace. Even more, I encourage people to live in and work for peace themselves. I do believe peace is possible if we aim for it knowing that peace itself is the way. I note that even Osama Bin Laden was a mother’s child.

Mother"s Day: Past & Present

1870~ Julia Ward Howe's Original Mother's Day Proclamation

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.


To read more about Julia Ward Howe, Mother's Day, and Peace go here.

2010~ Mom's Speak Out: End This Brutal War

No More War in Afghanistan!

This week Congress is voting on supplemental funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the tune of $94.2 billion dollars. Also this week, I finished a quite fascinating and very thoughtful book called, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c2004) by Pankaj Mishra.

Mishra, a native of India now residing in both London and India, was on a quest to discover the Buddha: his life in North India, what happened to Buddhism in India, the religion’s worldwide spread and its relationship to and meaning for our world today. His book includes travel notes, history and philosophy.

In the book’s final chapter, Mishra reported that he had been in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001, just months before 9-11. He had been trying, he said, to see and trace the ancient Buddhism of that area.

He wrote:

In the same place, a new kind of multinational religion and politics had grown in recent years. In squalid madrasas, where the Taliban had been given the most rudimentary education in the Koran and where another generation of young men prepared themselves for jihad men spoke calmly of how the oppressed Muslims of the world had come together in Afghanistan to destroy one superpower--the Soviet Union-- and would, with the grace of god, also take care of America and Israel if they did not relent in the persecution of Muslims.

I went to an international conference of radical Islamists near the border with Afghanistan, where 200,000 men--many of them from North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia--listened to speeches on similar themes.

In concluding his reporting on that conference, Mishra said that the speeches “remained fierce: speaker after speaker recounted a long history of humiliation and atrocity, the Crusades, Granada, Iran, Palestine, Kashmir, and urged Muslims to join the worldwide jihad against the United States and its allies.’ (Pp. 390, 391.)

In a recent article on Common Dreams, Abdul Malik Mujahid, a Pakistani-American who is an Imam in Chicago, President of Sound Vision, and the vice chair for a Council for a Parliament of World Religions, gives us a snapshot of the Afghan people today saying that they have a life expectancy of only forty-four years and tells us the conditions of war they have lived in the past thirty years.

He concludes:

President Obama has been right to pursue diplomacy with countries like Iran and for extending a hand to the Muslim world. However, he is dangerously wrong for pursuing the military path in Afghanistan. It is one that will only exacerbate terrorism, as well as further destroy a nation crippled by thirty years of war. It will lead to the deaths of more American soldiers. And I have no doubt that it will further lower the life expectancy of Afghans, those who continue to suffer the most.

I note that this vote in Congress on funding the war in Afghanistan is coming between Mother’s Day and Memorial Day.

In her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation, Julia Ward Howe wrote:

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."

In that proclamation calling for a peace conference of women, she said, “Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.” During this holiday weekend, our nation will be commemorating its war dead. I would hope that some would also give thought to those of other nations that we have killed, too, including the militants and civilians of Afghanistan and Pakistan and the conditions of the living.

In her proclamation, Howe also declared:

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.

As a human being, a woman, the mother of a military-age son and the soon-to-be grandmother of my son’s son, I call for an end to our war in Afghanistan and to its funding. We need more diplomacy and the meeting of humanitarian needs--theirs and ours. Bring our troops home.