Honoring Mothers and Fathers
American holidays borne in the hearts of two women.
By: Jana Bommersbach 04/01/2007
From the East came the push for a national Mother’s Day, while from the West came the campaign for Father’s Day.
The names of the women who made these holidays happen may have largely been forgotten, yet they leave a rich legacy. And one of them wrote perhaps the most beloved American anthem: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Mothers First
The creation of a national Mother’s Day—a half-century before Father’s Day—was an idea that started festering in the heart of Julia Ward Howe as the Civil War was coming to an end.
Julia was born in New York in 1819 to a well-off, strict Episcopalian family. Her mother died when she was a girl, and she was raised by a more liberal-minded uncle who guided her into becoming a young woman with liberal religious and social ideals.
At 21, she married reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, a radical Unitarian who believed in the value of every individual and manifested that by working with the blind and mentally ill. He did, alas, have one blind spot: he thought a woman’s place was in the home, and there’s where he hoped Julia would be content with the six children they brought into the world.
But she wasn’t. She found an outlet in writing poetry and devoting herself to the anti-slavery and suffrage movements. (She would become the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.)
On a trip to Washington, D.C., to visit President Abraham Lincoln in 1861, she visited a Union army camp and was struck by the strong marching beat of “John Brown’s Body”—a song sung both in the North and the South, but in the North, it celebrated the abolitionist, while the southern version derided him.
The next morning, a poem began forming in her mind. She grabbed the stub of a pen and scrawled the first few lines of what would become perhaps the most famous poem in American history:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
She wrote six stirring stanzas to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a song which is sung with a heart full of patriotism to this day as the unofficial anthem of the Republican party. It was first published in Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. She was paid $5.
History would forget Howe for creating the rousing poem, just as it would forget her 1870 mission to create Mother’s Day for Peace, a day she envisioned as a “worldwide protest of women against the cruelties of war.” Again, she penned a rallying poem to present her point:
Arise, then, women of this day! / Arise all women who have hearts whether your baptism be that of water or of tears!/ Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, / ‘Our husbands shall 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 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!’
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