Motherhood is a core theme in my writing
I'm feeling personal this newsletter so ...
sharing the joy of a granddaughter's arrival this week to my only son who was adopted. When I began writing Nonprofit Girl back in 2015, we had been reunited with his birth mom for several years. The book's genesis was my own reflections on the voices surrounding an unwanted pregnancy: the mother-to-be, Liv; her mother who had given up a baby; Liv's brother now reunited with the family; Liv's girlfriend urging abortion; an aunt who'd missed out on being a mother...and more!
By the time I finished the entire Nonprofit Girl Trilogy, its sentimental final Mother's Day scene included a gift with the proclamation that eventually led to our official Mother's Day. The Proclamation is well worth reading for its call to mothers to be activists - as relevant today as 150 years ago.
MOTHER’S DAY PROCLAMATION
Boston, 1870
Arise, then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
whether our 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!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
nor violence vindicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough 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 council.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means
whereby the great human family can live in peace,
each bearing after his own kind 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 at some place deemed most convenient,
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.“
~ Julia Ward Howe
Peace Alliance.org tells us: "Julia Ward Howe was a prominent American abolitionist, feminist, poet, and the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She nursed and tended the wounded during the civil war, and worked with the widows and orphans of soldiers on both sides of the war, realizing that the effects of the war go far beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. The devastation she witnessed during the civil war inspired her to call out for women to “rise up through the ashes and devastation,” urging a Mother’s Day dedicated to peace. Her advocacy continued as she saw war arise again in the world in the Franco-Prussian War.
"As the call for a Mother’s Day carried on, it gained new momentum and finally became a national holiday in the early 1900’s...."
No wonder Julia showed up in my novel Faith on the Mall
Not only because she wrote the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but because she married the great love of Senator Charles Sumner, the renowned anti-slavery orator who figures prominently in the book. Looking back at the writing of that work, I see how I began with a mother's terrible tragedy. So it seems I'm possessed with writing based in motherhood.
