“Arise, all women who have hearts!”
Julia Ward Howe is best remembered for writing “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” However, in 1870, she also worked to establish Mother’s Peace Day. For many years, she organized celebrations in Boston dedicated to the eradication of war. This began a tradition that would evolve to the celebration of a Mother’s Day. In 1907, Anna Jarvis began the campaign to establish an official Mother’s Day. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the national holiday as a “public expression of our love and reverence for all mothers.”
Here are the goals of the original Mother’s Peace Day in the words of Julia Ward Howe.
, 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.
Books about Julia Ward Howe
