Support global peace on Mother’s Day

By Krista Brewer
For the AJC
Sunday, May 10, 2009

On Mother’s Day, I look forward to the flowers and chocolates, and hugs and kisses from my three children. When they were younger, we enjoyed the tradition of a Mother’s Day picnic breakfast in a nearby park complete with ball play, swinging, sliding and, I’m sorry to say, a few whopper arguments. As their mom, I worked hard to restore peace in the family. As my children have grown and are now almost out of the nest, I find myself still working for peace, but in a different way.

In this time of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and conflicts elsewhere in the world, I and other women are going back to the true origins of our Mother’s Day holiday: as a call to end all wars.

During the Civil War, poet Julia Ward Howe was asked to write inspiring verses to lift the spirits of the Union forces. But when she was taken to observe a battlefield in northern Virginia, she was so appalled at the carnage, the number of deaths, the number of maimed soldiers, that she began a lifelong quest for peace. She came to believe that women were the ones who would carry the flag of peace in the United States and around the world.

Then, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday in May to be Mother’s Day as a way to honor mothers who had lost sons in war. It quickly became a commercial success, but the peaceable beginnings of this holiday were lost. The message of peace resonates deeply with many women for a very sad reason: They are so frequently the innocent victims of wars.

Howe produced the poem she was asked to write, which was later sold to Atlantic Monthly for $5 and published as The Battle Hymn of the Republic. But a short time later Howe wrote a peace proclamation calling for an assembly of women to end all wars. She also began working for a national day to be set aside as a Mother’s Day for Peace. The day was observed in early June for about 30 years in the late 1800s.

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“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 of 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 voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with

Our own. It says ‘Disarm! Disarm!’ “

—- Julia Ward Howe