Did you know that that Mother's Day in the United States was originally a woman's movement for peace. In 1870, Julia Ward Howe (best known for writing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic") published a Mother's Day Proclamation in reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War.
It didn't catch on, but her daughter Anna Jarvis continued and until in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.
Sadly the U.S. holiday became so commercialized that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become. But we can take it back.
Happy Mother's Day, one and all!
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