Mother's Day Peace March!

Start: Sunday, May 12, 2024•12:30 PM

End: Sunday, May 12, 2024• 2:00 PM

People for a Peaceful Tomorrow (Wilton Quaker Meeting, World BEYOND War CT and others of like mind on the need to build a peaceful world) gather annually on the bridge next to the Maritime Aquarium parking lot. We march through SoNo and then go to lunch together to celebrate the original meaning of Mother's Day, founded by Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist and author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," who called for all women to work for peace. In 1870 she made the following proclamation for her Mother's 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! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out 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 learning after his 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 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.

Her prescient call for a global organization for peace led by women predated the world wars of the twentieth century and now here we are with barbaric horrors in Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan among others. There can be no peace without justice. We need to push our elected officials to work for both.