Julia Ward Howe – Engaging Peace

Why not a Father’s Day for Peace?

Posted on June 14, 2012June 13, 2012 by kathiemm

This blog has featured a Mother’s Day for Peace, describing the roots of the current flowers-and-candy-for-Mom day in the work of Julia Ward Howe.

A nod towards initiating a Father’s Day of Peace was made in 2007 in a brief video from Brave New Foundation. The video provided a poignant reminder that fathers around the world love their children and want to see them survive, but little seems to have been done since then to promote a Father’s Day of Peace. Why not?

It’s time for fathers to link themselves to peace, not war.

Role models are available for men of peace: Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Liu Xiabo, Muhammed Yunis, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Elie Wiezel, Desmond Tutu, Lech Walesa, and thousands of other less well-known men. Maybe your own dad is among them.

Perhaps Veterans for Peace (VFP) could take up this banner. Their goal is to “change public opinion in the U.S. from an unsustainable culture of militarism and commercialism to one of peace, democracy, and sustainability.” They have over 100 chapters in the United States, funded in part through a grant from Howard Zinn. One of their participating groups is the Smedley Butler chapter in Boston, MA, which provided active support for Occupy Boston in 2011.

Learn more about VFP’s mission through this video, then write to them and ask them to add the promotion of a Father’s Day of Peace to their projects.

No dad needs another necktie on Father’s Day. What he needs is a path that offers his children the best opportunity for growing to maturity in a world of peace.

Promote a Father’s Day for Peace.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Contribute a peace of the pie

Posted on May 10, 2012May 9, 2012 by patdaniel

Mother’s Day is Sunday, and the Eighth Annual Mother’s Day National Action Day is tomorrow, Friday May 11.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, a Unitarian Universalist, launched a campaign to promote an annual Mother’s Day devoted not to candy and flowers but to disarmament. She placed her trust in mothers as peace activists.

The Peace Alliance recommends that on Mother’s Day National Action Day, women strive to make peace a piece of the pie. Check out their suggestions for what you can do to promote peace tomorrow and every day.

Do this on behalf of the child victims of war. Children are dying horrific deaths daily in many parts of the world, often from drone attacks launched by the United States, or from weapons bought from the US. They lose their limbs and eyesight, as well as their families and neighbors. Children are forced to live as refugees from the wars that devastate their lands.

Mother’s Day is a good day to remember those children and to take action to stop the carnage.

Honor your mother, your grandmother, your wife, or your sister this Mother’s Day by joining the Mother’s Day National Action. Finally, please view a superb documentary on the aftereffects of war.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Women anti-warriors: Fighting war with poetry

Posted on August 18, 2011August 17, 2011 by kathiemm

Moral engagement depends on moral agency—both inhibitive moral agency (refusing to let others push one into immoral behavior) and proactive moral agency (actively pursuing moral goals even in the face of threat and danger). For generations, women have expressed both forms of agency in anti-war poetry.

Julia Ward Howe, in her poem “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” recommends inhibitive agency when she first tells women,

“Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.”

Howe invokes proactive agency in the conclusion of her poem when she urges women to gather together:

“To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.”

Poems have a remarkable power to promote compassion and empathy. See these expressed in the work of a marvelous anti-war poet of the Vietnam era—Denise Levertov—in this YouTube production.

Can inhibitive moral agency promote peace? Listen to the magnificent Palestinian American woman, Suheir Hammed, tell you what she won’t do (“kill for you”) in her poem, “What I will” (shown above).

Does this poem leave you feeling energized and motivated to resist the war machine?

Can women poets take on generals, Presidents, Pentagons to reject the propaganda and the evils of war? Read “The low road” by Marge Piercy.

We think you will answer “Yes” to both questions.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Mother’s Day of Peace

Posted on May 5, 2011July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

“Mine eyes have seen the glory…” These words from the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the famous Civil War song written by Julia Ward Howe, are probably familiar to all of our readers. But how many of you know that Julia, horrified by the Civil War, became an anti-war activist and, in 1870, wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation, which included the words:

“From the bosum of a 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 our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate 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 counsel.”

Her efforts led to the establishment in 1872 of a Mothers’ Peace Day Observance, the forerunner and inspiration of the annual Mother’s Day, which is now celebrated around the globe, usually in March, April, or May, depending on the country.

To hear a contemporary reading of Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation, go to

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/8/mothers_day_for_peace_a_dramatic

These celebrations are not just about flowers and candy; millions of mothers across the world fight year round for peace.

This year, in honor of Mother’s Day, find a way to give a gift of peace (the most peaceful gift you can imagine)—to your mother, to your community, to the world.

Then please submit a comment to this post and tell us what your gift of peace was—a special quiet hour with your mom? A donation of time or money in her name to a peace organization or rally? A gift of peace is a gift of and for life.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology