Mothers' Day was originally (1870) an anti-war day

When you are celebrating Mothers' Day on Sunday (May 10) it would be a good idea to remember the reason Julia Ward Howe first suggested the holiday. According to Amy Goodman (on Democracy Now) this morning: Julia Ward Howe’s “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” which was written in 1870, protest[ed] the carnage of the Civil War, Amy also showed a brief new film by Robert Greenwald on Mothers' Day. Here are the opening words (Reading the film by Gloria Steinem):

Mother’s Day really was in its origin an antiwar day, an antiwar statement. Julia Ward Howe was sickened by what had happened during the Civil War, the loss of life, the carnage, and she created Mother’s Day as a call for women all over the world to come together and create ways of protesting war, of making a kind of alternate government that could finally do away with war as an acceptable way of solving conflict

Obviously this is as relevant today (maybe more) than in 1870.

Here is the excerpt from Greenwald's Mothers' Day video (as shown this morning on Democracy Now).




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