Happy Mother's Day, all.
Ever wonder what this holiday's about?
In the United States Mother's Day was first suggested in 1872 by Julia Ward Howe (who wrote the words to the Battle hymn of the Republic) as a day dedicated to peace. Ms. Howe would hold organized Mother's Day meetings in Boston, Mass ever year.
Funny, that. One of the top Google hits for Mother's Day... and it does mention Ms. Howe. But it neatly Bowdlerizes what her Mother's Day was about, while nicely waving the flag patriotically.
This one, another top hit, barely even mentions Howe.
Hallmarked to death, what is this holiday about? Is this just a smarmy once-a-year give your mother flowers and say thanks holiday... or is it--like Labor Day--something more? Something, perhaps, that's more profound and meaningful than a box of chocolates? And how is it connected with the Battle Hymn of the Republic?
Julia Ward was born in 1819. Her mother died when she was five, and Julia was raised in a sternly Calvinist Episcopalian home. When her father died, an uncle with rather more liberal ideas on religion became her guardian, ideas which colored her views of religion and social issues.
At 21, she married Samuel Gridley Howe, a reformer who had fought for Greek independence and had recently become director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston. Howe was a radical, a Unitarian and part of the Transcendentalist movement--views which led him to value the development of every person and to work with the blind, with the mentally ill, and those in prison--as well as to embrace Abolitionism.
Julia had become a Unitarian already, the result of her extensive reading and thinking. For her, Jesus was a model of how to behave. As a radical who did not hold her own beliefs as the sole path to salvation, she believed that religion was a matter of "deed, not creed." The Howes attended the Unitarian church ministered to by Rev. Theodore Parker. Parker was a radical Unitarian among radical--and radicalized--Unitarians. He was an advocate against slavery and for women's rights. He is recorded as having written sermons with a handgun on his desk, ready to defend runaway slaves hiding in his basement -- a station on the Underground Railroad on the way to freedom and safety in Canada.
Samuel Howe, despite his radical views and appreciation for Julia's mind and wit, felt that a woman's place was in the home, supporting her husband. This led to an inevitable tension between the Howes; at one point they verged on divorce, and only Julia's unwillingness to abandon the role of mother (the divorce law of the time would have left the children in their father's care) appears to have kept that from occurring.
For a time, she devoted herself to her family and to educating herself, as well as her children. She supported Samuel's causes, and for a time worked with Samuel publishing an abolitionist paper. And, she began, despite his opposition, to write and to become more involved in public life. As Samuel became more and more actively involved in anti-slavery activities (he led a band of anti-slavery settlers into "Bloody" Kansas in 1856), Julia became more and more active, publishing plays and poems... which seems to have alienated and angered Samuel.
The Howes radical abolitionist circle included many who were involved in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Evidence suggests that the "Secret Six" who funded Brown's raid included Rev. Parker, and may have included Samuel Howe. That story is buried in mystery, and it is unclear how well some of them understood Brown's plans.
During the Civil War, the Howes became involved in the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a poorly remembered service that was a forerunner of the Red Cross. More deaths during the war were the result of disease caused by poor sanitation in POW and army camps than were the hideously bloody battles of the war. The Sanitary Commission achieved significant reforms, resulting in far fewer deaths caused by disease later in the war.
Invited to meet with President Lincoln in Washington because of their work, they went to watch a Union army review which was disrupted by a Confederate attack. Returning to the city, surrounded by retreating troops, the party began to sing patriotic songs, including the popular "John Brown's Body."
A member of their party, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, familiar with Julia's poems, encouraged her to write better words for the tune (which, ironically, had been by a Southerner for religious revivals). She wrote in her diary:
"I replied that I had often wished to do so.... in spite of the excitement of the day I went to bed and slept as usual, but awoke the next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I lay quite still until the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts, then hastily arose, saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don't write it down immediately. I searched for an old sheet of paper and an old stub of a pen which I had had the night before, and began to scrawl the lines almost without looking, as I learned to do by often scratching down verses in the darkened room when my little children were sleeping. Having completed this, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not before feeling that something of importance had happened to me."
The poem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was published in the February, 1862 The Atlantic Monthly.
The resulting attention led Julia Ward Howe into a greater public role and she was asked to speak frequently. Her husband, though never actively a supporter of this, seems to have come to terms with his wife's fame and public activity.
Julia was appalled by the war itself, by the carnage and the suffering and death she had seen. In 1870, horrified at war between France and Prussia, she she began to call for women to rise up and oppose all war, across national lines, and to dedicate themselves to finding peaceful resolutions to conflict. Hoping to gather women to take action, she issued this Declaration
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 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 voice 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 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 someplace deemed most convenient
And 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.
An attemped Womens Peace Congress in London failed to take shape in 1872 and she returned to Boston. Her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace failed, although she organized a Mothers' Peace Day observance on the second Sunday in June and held the meeting for a number of years. Her proposal was influenced by Anna Jarvis, an Appalachian homemaker who had tried in 1858 to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women during the war to work for sanitary conditions (on both sides), and began work, in 1868 to reconcile people who had supported the opposing sides.
Anna's daughter, also named Anna, would have been familiar with her mother's work, as well as that of Julia Ward Howe's.
This second Anna Jarvis, at her mother's graveside in 1905, devoted her life to her mother's project, to establish a Mother's Day to honor mothers, living and dead. In 1907, she passed out 500 white carnations--one for each mother in the congregation--at St. Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, WV, her mother's church. That church responded to her request, and on May 10, 1908, became the first to celebrate Mother's Day. The custom caught on. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson, declared the first national Mother's Day.
Anna wanted Mother's Day to be a day of sentiment, not a commercial holiday. She was appalled by greeting cards and the selling of flowers for the holiday. I admire and honor her dedication to getting Mother's Day celebrated. Perhaps only in this form could it have been embraced by the public and government, a warm holiday that no one in their right minds would object to. Mom, the flag, and apple pie.
But its roots lie in her mother's work, and Julia Ward Howe's. It is entangled with the movement for women's rights and suffrage, bound up with abolition and the Civil War. It is a holiday that comes directly from the anguished call of two mothers for peace and reconciliation, the plea for humanity to lay down arms--forever--and to find reasonable ways to resolve conflict, so that no mother must suffer the untimely loss of a child in war, whether a soldier or a civilian casualty of war. Mothers, who struggle to keep the peace at home daily, are the icon that Howe envisioned for an international peace movement.
If you honor your mother... make peace.
May it come to be so.