The mom who started it all worked for peace and community activism, saying a firm no to commercialization.
By Fiona Tinwei Lam, Today, TheTyee.ca
Anne Marie Jarvis, founder of Mother's Day
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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 of
murder is not the balance of justice."
(from Julia Ward Howe's Mother’s Day Proclamation, 1870)
Good luck finding a greeting card containing those historic lines composed by one of the notable women who set the stage for the establishment of Mother's Day over 100 years ago. In contrast to the celebrations related to mother goddesses conducted by Ancient Greeks and Romans thousands of years ago, the North American holiday has civic and pacifist roots. Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist, suffragist, poet and author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, wrote her Mother's Day Proclamation, calling for an International Mother's Day to promote international peace in response to the horrors of the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War. In 1873, several women's groups held celebrations on June 2 to observe Howe's Mother's Day for Peace, which endured for a few years with her funding in over a dozen U.S. cities, and for a decade in Howe's hometown of Boston, despite the lack of official national recognition.
http://thetyee.ca/Life/2011/05/06/MothersDayRadicalRoots/