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Some history I forgot to mention about Mother’s Day for some people who might not know. /thread
Mother’s Day as we know it is a holiday formally recognised by the United States on May 10th, 1908, founded by Anna Maria Jarvis (who actually wanted it to be abolished after seeing the commercialisation of it) in honour of her late mother.
What is not so well known is that the inspiration for Anna Jarvis’ holiday actually came from this woman, Julia Ward Howe, who worked with Anna’s mother. The original idea was called ‘Appeal to womanhood throughout the world’ and later ‘Mother's Day Proclamation’.
The idea behind the Mother’s Day Proclamation, in a nutshell, was for a day universally recognised by women internationally who would use each other to shape their societies at the political level. The whole thing was a pacifist reaction to the American Civil War & Franco-Rus war
Julia’s efforts were unsuccessful, but 30 years later Anna Jarvis would found the modern Mother’s Day, even if it was deviated from the original concept to appeal to a far, far, far larger group of people and the societies they lived in.
I made this thread because I also wanted to focus on Julia Ward Howe’s other activities during the mid-to-late 1800’s. First, she was apart of the first big wave for women’s suffrage. She was also an abolitionist who championed the 15th amendment even when her peers (NWSA) didnt.
She also had an unfinished novel detailing the life of an intersex person born as a male, which ends with his acceptance and embracement of his self. The book is called The Hermaphrodite, and was the reason that term was used to someone having reproductive organs of both sexes.
My favourite little piece of Julia’s history is her creation of the lyrics for Battle Hymn of the Republic, using the music from the marching song John Brown's Body (another abolitionist, and a very cool one). It became the Union Army’s unofficial anthem. The lyrics are here:
This song is noteworthy because it’s been used in everything from baseball games to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches. For its time, and among a majority of racists that would put anybody in 2020 to shame, its lyrical content involving martyrdom in the name of freeing slaves was-
—very progressive. An abolitionist writer using music from an abolitionist folk-song for an army and country that was not at all abolitionist was almost like a sort of ruse done by Julia Howe, and its became engrained into the patriotic culture of our country.
I got inspired to write this because I saw Neo-Confederates on youtube post under the song acting like it’s a piece of their *America. Its not, and its author says choke. The instrumental music itself was written for a man who tallied 13 casualties in the name of abolitionism.
Slavery was the core of the foundation of the CSA. You cannot have the CSA and its constitution without the institution of slavery to drive it. Otherwise its just a conglomeration of states who joined together just for the sake of it. Therefore, leave the funny song alone.
