The Origin of Mother’s Day
The best gift you can give for Mother’s Day to the women you love is to remember and celebrate its origin and original purpose. Here it is…
Did you know that Mother's Day, the holiday that we now celebrate in the US on the first Sunday in May with flowers and gifts for Moms, had a very different birth purpose? This holiday had its origins in the heart and pen of Juliet Ward Howe the famous lyricist of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" written during the Civil War. While an ardent supporter of the fight to end slavery and keep the country together, she was sickened by the carnage of the Civil war. In 1870, appalled by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and the clamoring of young men to go fight overseas, she declared a Mothers’ Day Proclamation for Peace and had it translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German and Swedish and disseminated internationally. Hear her words:
"Arise arise .....great congress of women of all nationalities who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears… We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies... and our children 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 to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” She continued, " Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his time the sacred impress not of Caesar but of God.”
She ended her proclamation by declaring, …
”In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality 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.
Two years later, in 1872, JWH went to London to spread her message, and when an established peace organization there would not let her speak to them because of her gender, she hired a hall and conducted her own meetings.
So here we are. One hundred and fifty years later, as we come out of the year of the Great Pause, “women of all nationalities who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears” are pondering the great question of the 21rst century, “How can the human family live in peace with each other and the natural world?”
The answer to this question falls on each of us to respond in our unique way, drawing on our authentic gifts. We are being called on to choose to be brave, to be courageous and to be, yes, Epic. This is not just an essential question for women. However, we women are all mothers at heart, be it for our own children or all children, known and unknown. We have a deep intergenerational knowing, passed on genetically, culturally, biologically and psychologically. We are the birthers, the nurturers, and the mourners. We feel the urgent call to hospice the old soul-crushing systems and mid-wife the life-giving systems of the future. And we have Epic work to do.
Let me close this call for a true celebration of Mother’s Day by quoting my firend, the magical Sikh activist, lawyer and founder of Revolutionary Love, Valarie Kaur, who said it best in a prayer breakfast in Washington as the eve of the 2017 presidential inauguration:
“What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? … What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind now … What if they are whispering in our ears “You are brave”? What if this is our nation’s greatest transition?...What does the midwife tell us to do? Breathe. And then, Push. Because if we don’t push we will die…Tonight we will breathe. Tomorrow we will labor … through love and your revolutionary love is the magic we will show our children.
Happy Mother’s Day!