Originally published in Synapse on May 7, 1981.
In calling for a national day of protest against the arms race on May 10, the new Women’s Party for Survival is returning to Mother’s Day its original intention — giving American women a chance to combine their voices in unified opposition to the insanity of war.
That was the declared purpose of the first Mother’s Day, which was organized in Boston by poet and women’s suffragist Julia Ward Howe in 1872. Howe’s establishment of a special day for mothers — and for peace — followed unsuccessful efforts to pull together an international pacifist conference in the wake of the bloody Franco-Prussian War.
“While the war was still in progress,” she later wrote, “I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism; the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced, itself upon me, ‘Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?’
“I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way of expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world, which I then and there composed.”
Frustrated in her desire to transform that appeal into a kind of women’s summit conference on peace, Howe then turned to the notion of a Mother’s Day “which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines. I chose for this the second day of June, this being a time when flowers are abundant, and when the weather usually allows of open air meetings. I had some success in carrying out this plan.”
The day of peace envisioned by Howe was held in Boston and elsewhere for several years, but by the time of World War One, the process of commercialization leading to the present form of Mother’s Day was well underway.
Thanks to the Women’s Party for Survival, however, the original peace-honoring purpose of Mother’s Day may be restored after 70 years of neglect.
