While countries around the world celebrate their own Mother's Day at different times throughout the year, several countries, including the United States, Italy, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Turkey celebrate it on the second Sunday of May -- which is this Sunday.
Here in the United States, the origins of the official holiday go back to 1870, when Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), an abolitionist best remembered as the poet who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," also worked to establish a "Mother's Peace Day." Howe dedicated the celebration to the eradication of war, and she organized festivities in Boston for many years.
In 1907, Anna Jarvis, of Philadelphia, began the campaign to have Mother's Day officially recognized, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson did that, proclaiming it a national holiday and a "public expression of our love and reverence for all mothers." Today's commercialized celebration of candy, flowers, gift certificates, and lavish meals at restaurants bears little resemblance to Howe's original idea.
Not that there is nothing wrong with that, mind you. But here, for the record's sake, is the proclamation she wrote in 1870, which explains, in her own impassioned words, the goals of the original holiday:
Arise, all women who have hearts, 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.
Okay, a little over the top. But is it any worse than this?
[Thanks to Ruth Walton of the United Methodist Federation for Social Action for inspiring, and mostly writing, this message.]
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