Volume 7 , Issue 19

Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation...

Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) was a poet who co-published the anti-slavery newspaper The Commonwealth with her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe. In 1861 she wrote the words to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which became the recognized theme song of the Union during the Civil War.

After the war Howe continued writing, became active in the woman's suffrage movement and advocated world peace. In 1908 she became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Here is the original, pre-Hallmark, Mother's Day Proclamation, penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870:

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 great 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 our 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 then 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 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. --- Julia Ward Howe

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