Mother’s Day for Peace
THURS May 9th, 6:30PM
Modjeska Simkins House
2025 Marion St. Columbia, SC
Dinner & Speakers celebrating the origins of Mother’s Day as a peace holiday and the contribution of mothers. Sharing and honoring the legacy of mothers who have worked for change! Tributes to mothers who have worked for change invited.
Sliding scale donation for dinner
RSVP info@carolinapeace.org or Peaceline (803) 216-1448 (Leave Message)
and/or
RSVP/Share on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/369167819870333/
For more on the origins of Mother’s Day, click “Read More.”
ORIGINS OF MOTHER’S DAY
Originally called Mother’s Day for Peace, Julie Ward Howe proclaimed Mother’s Day in 1870 as a pacifist rejection of war in the wake of the American Civil War and the onset of the Franco-Prussian War. The 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation calls on women to take action for peace, rejecting their husbands and sons going to war, and creating an international movement to settle differences between nations without bloodshed. Anna Jarvis later successfully campaigned to make Mother’s Day an official holiday in honor of her mother, Ann Jarvis, who had begun Mother’s Day Work Clubs in five cities to improve health and sanitation and to minister to the wounds of Union and the Confederate soldiers with neutrality. Anna Jarvis was disgusted to see the commercialization Mother’s Day and fought against it, at times getting arrested for protesting that commercialization in the 1920s. She thought that store bought cards and cut flowers were cheap tokenism that didn’t honestly honor mothers or the legacy of women working for change she had worked for recognition of.
This Mother’s Day, remember your mother, but also remember the origins of Mother’s Day.
Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided 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 the 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 out 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 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.
Carolina Peace Resource Center 