A Father’s Lost History of a Grandma’s Soother Day: Recovering Anti-War, Anti-Colonial Roots of Mother’s Day

An Invitation to Remember Differently

Before Hallmark. Before the card companies, before flowers and pink brunches, before the guilt and commercial machinery, there was something else entirely.

A Day for Peace and peace builders – A Day for Women and Mothers. This was a Mothers’ Day Proclamation

There was a woman standing in Boston in 1870, her pen aimed not at sentiment but at empire. Her name was Julia Ward Howe, and she had already written “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — a song that could be sung by Union soldiers marching toward Richmond. But that war had ended. And another war had begun. Howe, an abolitionist who had seen a slave’s chain up close, now saw the soldier’s grave being dug by the same hands.

She issued a document we have largely forgotten: a Mother’s Day Proclamation. It was not sentimentally overly simplistic. No. It was not about breakfast in bed. It included no bubbly nor cosmopolitans. It was refusing to send sons to kill other mothers’ sons. It was organizing women across national boundaries to demand arbitration instead of artillery. It was, in every sense, anti-war; an anti-colonial, anti-state-violence document.

“Again, in the sight of the Christian world,” she wrote, “have the skill and power of man been bent on the destruction of human life.”

Not exactly greeting card sentiments. A rough, tumble declaration of moral certitude. Clearness rising from a Mother.

Soothers: An Unnamed Tradition

Before we go further, let us name something that has no formal name in any historical record but deserves one. Let us call them Soothers — women (and some men, though our record is sparse) who understood that care work is political work, that tending our wounded is not separate from refusing to create more wounded, that to wipe a fevered brow is also to ask: Why is this fever here? Why is this wound here? Why is this war here?

The Soothers did not keep calendars the way we do. They did not rank seasons. They did not elevate Christmas above Armistice Day or Easter above a Tuesday when a neighbor needed help. This is not because they lacked reverence. It is because their reverence was experiential, not commemorative. A truth that requires a special day to be remembered may not be a truth at all — it may be a performance.

Our Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) understood this. Historically, Quakers do not celebrate particular holy days — not Christmas, nor Easter — we hold how experience shows every day is equally saturated with a divine, to mark one as special is to imply others more ordinary. This is not a rejection of celebration. It is a rejection of ranking.

What if Mother’s Day had emerged from this Soother’s sensibility? What if it had never become a holiday but remained a habit? A regular, unremarkable, uncommodifiable practice of refusing violence and tending wounds?

Two Mothers, Two Visions

One standard history of Mother’s Day in these United States usually begins and ends with Anna Jarvis, a woman who successfully lobbied for a national holiday in 1914; then spent the rest of her life furious at how it was commercialized. But Anna was not the origin of the Mother’s Day. Her mother was.

Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis (1832–1905) lived in Appalachian Virginia (later West Virginia). She bore more than a dozen children. Most of them died — from diphtheria, from measles, from diseases that flourished in the environmental neglect of the poor. Ann organized Mothers’ Work Clubs and Mother’s Work Days, not to celebrate motherhood abstractly but to clean up trash, teach hygiene, and keep children alive. This was public health as collective care.

Then the Civil War came. Her region was bitterly divided. Neighbors killed neighbors. Ann did something that seems, from our vantage, almost impossibly radical: she insisted that her clubs help both Confederate and Union soldiers. She organized a Mother’s Friendship Day in 1868 to bring families from both sides together. This was not neutrality. It was active peace-building across a bloody divide.

Julia Ward Howe knew Ann Jarvis, or knew of her. Howe’s 1870 Proclamation may well have been inspired by what she saw in West Virginia: mothers refusing to let war have the last word.

But Howe’s vision was larger, more structural, more explicitly political. She called for an international congress of women — “without limit of nationality” — to demand the amicable settlement of international questions. She saw that motherhood without the vote was vulnerability. She wrote:

“We ask for the ballot not as a privilege, but as a weapon. With it, we shall refuse taxation for war. Without it, we are but breeders of cannon fodder.”

This is not sentimental. This is strategic.

Braiding a Threefold Cord: Abolition, Suffrage, Peace

Howe saw no separation among these struggles. In a letter to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, she wrote a line that deserves to be memorized and internalized:

“The slave’s chain and the soldier’s grave are forged in the same fire. The mother who freed her child from bondage must now free him from the conscription. The ballot is the hammer.”

This is the lost history. Mother’s Day was not originally about thanking an individual woman for her personal sacrifice. It was about ending the conditions that require that sacrifice — whether the sacrifice of an enslaved child torn from her mother, or a conscripted son sent to die in a Prussian field, or a Black soldier enlisted to fight for a freedom he did not yet possess at home.

Roughly 1873 to 1913, Mother’s Day for Peace services were held annually, in large cities wherever suffragists were organizing. These weren’t quiet teas. They were political assemblies. They were to demand disarmament. They demanded a vote. Moms’ demanding to end colonial logic: To stop turning young men to tools of empire.

Then something shifted. Anna Jarvis, Ann’s daughter, succeeded in establishing a national Mother’s Day — but she stripped it of its peace activism. She was not uninterested in peace, but her focus was different: she wanted to honor the individual mother, particularly her own. She chose white carnations. She urged handwritten letters. She wanted sentiment, not strategy.

Sentiment, as we know, sells.

What We Lost When We Lost Our Soother’s Habit

Today, Mother’s Day is a commercial juggernaut — cards, flowers, brunches, jewelry, guilt. Father’s Day followed the same pattern, though it has no origin story in anti-war activism. (Father’s Day was invented largely by Sonora Smart Dodd in 1910 to honor her widowed father, a Civil War veteran. It has no parallel history of pacifist organizing.) The asymmetry is striking: one parent’s day began as a radical demand to end state violence; the other began as a grateful acknowledgment of single parenting. And now both are indistinguishable in their commercial emptiness.

But the deeper loss is not commercial. It is conceptual.

When we turned Mother’s Day into a generic occasion for gratitude, we lost the Soother’s habit — the practice of treating every day as equally worthy of attention, equally capable of holding the sacred, equally demanding of our refusal to rank suffering or specialize care. We lost the Quaker intuition that a holy day is an oxymoron: either every day is holy, or none is.

We also lost the anti-colonial edge. Howe’s Proclamation was not just about wars between European powers. It was about the logic of empire — the logic that some lives are expendable, some children are cannon fodder, some mothers are expected to grieve quietly while others are celebrated. She saw that conscription is a form of bondage. She saw that a mother who cannot vote is a mother who cannot protect.

Non-Sexist, Non-Secularist, Inclusive, Equitable Soother’s Day

What would it look like to recover this history without reproducing its limitations?

Let us be clear: the original Mother’s Day movement was not without problems. It was overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and Christian in its framing. Howe’s “appeal to womanhood” assumed a universal sisterhood that did not account for the very different relationships that enslaved Black women, Indigenous women, and immigrant women had to the state, to war, and to motherhood itself. A recovered tradition must be self-critical about these elisions.

Here’s a suggestion not for new holidays, but for habits. Let’s build daily habits gratitude and equanimous kindness. Call it Soother’s Day, or simplicity’s Soother Practice. Not a day on the calendar, but a regular, unmarked, uncommodifiable orientation:

To Experiment with End of War as Experiment in Moral Living

Julia Ward Howe wrote: “I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed … to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

That congress never fully materialized. But the invitation remains.

What if we celebrated nothing this year? What if, instead of buying a card, we wrote a letter to our local representative demanding an end to military conscription (where it still exists) and a redirection of war funding to public health? What if, instead of brunch, we sat with someone who is grieving — a mother who has lost a child to gun violence, a father who has lost a son to a distant war, a Soother of any gender who is tending wounds that should never have been inflicted? What if, instead of flowers, we cleaned up the environmental toxins in our neighborhoods — the way Ann Jarvis did — because those toxins are also a form of violence, slow and state-sanctioned?

This is not anti-celebration. It is the Right Ordered rehabilitation of a deeper tradition: This tradition says truth is experimental, that peace is not a feeling but a practice, that the mother who frees her child from bondage must also free them from conscription, and that the ballot — or whatever tool is available to us — is the hammer.

No sticker shock. No special day. Just the quiet, radical, unending work of soothing a world that has been taught to wound.

A Father’s Invitation

You do not need to be a mother. You do not need to be a woman. You do not need to believe in God or in any particular god. You do not need to reject Father’s Day or any other day of remembrance. You are invited only to try and experiment: One year, refuse to rank your days. Refuse to let any single day carry a weight of gratitude, or grief, or political resistance. Spread this weight across all your days, evenly, habitually, quietly.

When someone asks you what you are doing — why you are writing that letter, sitting with that griever, cleaning that corner, refusing that rush to war — you can say:

I am practicing Soother’s Day. It is not on any calendar. It is not for every day. But it also began in women who had lost many children. They decided our only fitting response was to refuse to lose any more. Thus it continues wherever anyone decides care is political, that nonviolence is possible, that all swords of murder do not cut out a balance of justice.

That is part of where we are today. Inside the lost history. Let us begin to find it again.

Americans don’t know that Mother’s Day began as a call to end conscription and empire – authored by a Quaker-inspired suffragist. This piece traces that lost history and asks: What would it mean for South Jersey families to reclaim Mother’s Day not as a shopping holiday, but as a day of strategic refusal?