Mother's Day, Revisited

Sometime during the late 50's ors early 60's, my Canadian born mother, then living in California, applied for US citizenship. All went smoothly and she was well on her way until it came time to actually take the oath. As she heard it read, she balked, for the oath contained a clause that one would bear arms in defence of the country. Being a pacifist, she would go not further, and her citizenship efforts came to a halt. It was a few years later when this clause was removed, that the same judge contacted her, told her of the change,  offered to administer the oath of citizenship, and she became a citizen of the United States of America. 

The origin of Mother's Day actually started after the Civil War by women who had lost their sons in that war and as a protest of the carnage of war. In 1870 a Boston poet and suffragette, Julia Ward Howe, published a proclamation:

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking of 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 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 on a 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 our dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow 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 then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held in some place deemed more convent 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.

This year, May 11th, 2014, marks the 100th anniversary of the official national designation of Mother's Day. So send your mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and mother-friends some love, and remember how all this started.

Although she died in 1983 at the age of 75,  I still remember my courageous mother, Ivy Christine Jackson!

Picture above of my parents is

 by a street photographer

in San Francisco, c. 1943