Mothers Day reminds great Julia Ward Howe

Mother’s Day reminds great Julia Ward Howe of the original 1870 pacifist Mother’s Day Proclamation

Mother’s Day 2021 Wishes Images and Quotes

In the United States, Mother’s Day was earlier suggested by poet and cultural activist Julia Ward Howe. 

In early 1870, after seeing the massacre of the American Civil War and the start of the Franco-Prussian War, she wrote the first Mother’s Day Announcement asking the women of the world to unite for peace. 

This “Mother’s Day Announcement” would establish the seed for what would ultimately become a public holiday.

After addressing the advertisement, Howe had it transcribed into various differents languages and consumed the next two years of her life sharing it and conversing with women leaders all over the planet. 

In the book Memories, Howe composed, Why do not the mothers of the nation face these things to stop the waste of that personal growth of which they only offer and know the value?

In 1907, thirty-seven years after the announcement was written, women’s rights activist Anna Jarvis started fighting for the establishment of a nationwide observed Mother¹s Day holiday. 

In 1914, four years later Howe’s departure, President Woodrow Wilson announced Mother’s Day as a public holiday.

Julia Ward Howe was a writer, poet, and activist who fought vigilantly for peace, the destruction of slavery, and women’s equities.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, she co-published The Commonwealth, an abolitionist press, with her partner Samuel Gridley Howe. 

In 1860, she wrote the Battle Hymn of The Republic to encourage Union warriors fighting in the war. The poem became a rallying cry for the Union throughout the war and persists in her most famous work.

The fears of the war led her to battle tirelessly for peace. She worked as president of the American member of the Women’s International Peace Association, and in 1870 she wrote her Mother’s Day Advertisement. Julia Ward Howe was also helpful in the women’s vote campaign. She was a co-founder of the American Woman Suffrage Association and served as director of Woman’s Journal. Her impact on the campaign ranks her beside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cody Stanton as some of the most influential voices of the time.

In honor of her great influence on American society and antiquity, Julia Ward Howe was the first woman elected to the American Association of Arts and Letters in 1908. A real American pioneer, Julia Ward Howe remains one of the most prominent characters in the history of both the civil and women’s rights movements.