Mother’s Day: A Peace Movement
Did you know Mother’s Day began as a peace movement?
Anne Reeves Jarvis brought mothers together with Confederate and Union soldiers after the civil war to promote reconciliation. And abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward Howe wrote a proclamation in 1870 imploring mothers to unite and promote world peace.
Anna Jarvis, Anne Reeves Jarvis’ daughter, is the one who campaigned for Mother’s Day to become an official U.S. holiday in 1914. She wanted the day to be about children celebrating the sacrifices their mothers made for them.
Not a mother herself, she argued that holidays were biased toward male achievements and started a massive letter writing campaign to see to it that Mother’s Day became a national holiday. As Mother’s Day became more and more commercialized, though, Anna became disgusted with its divergence from her original intent and spent the remainder of her life protesting Mother’s Day profiteers.
What if we returned to Mother’s Day as a peace movement?
What if, instead of individualizing and stereotyping, we united through letter writing and marching, painting and singing to create systemic change that supports all caregivers?
What kind of world would this be? What kind of community could we create?
Let’s find out.
Learn more about how mothers everywhere are working to make change through these Instagram accounts:
#mothersday #peace #mothers #gunsafety
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/mothers-day
Written by author of Blessed are the Women: Naming & Reclaiming Women's Stories From the Gospels, Claire McKeever-Burgett.
