This year I’m celebrating Mother’s Day with a mashup about Julia Ward Howe a founding mother of U.S. Mother’s Day, and the astonishing Hissa Hilal, the first female finalist on Poet of Millions, Abu Dhabi’s poetry version of American Idol.  

Julia Ward Howe saw a natural connection between motherhood and the struggles to abolish slavery, achieve women’s suffrage, and win international peace.  Her 1862 poem, written after visiting a Union Army camp, was published in the Atlantic Monthly and became the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, a Union Army anthem.

Howe no doubt saw an alignment between the fight to abolish slavery and the idea of a “just” war.   But that was hard to sustain. The Civil War was the bloodiest in American history, claiming more American lives (620,000) than any other U.S. wars from the Revolution through Vietnam.

So, in 1870,  Howe proposed a “Mother’s Day for Peace” and wrote the Mothers Day Proclamation — a call to mothers everywhere to take a stand against war and for peace on an international scale.   Howe organized a first “Mother’s Day” as an anti-war observance in New York on June 2, 1872.  But it wasn’t until 1913 that Congress officially declared the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

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