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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN – MAY 9, 2026  
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Heather Cox Richardson
May 9, 2026
Letters from an American
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_ If you google the history of Mother’s Day . . . _

Julia Ward Howe, After Benjamin Curtis Porter, Public domain, via
Wikimedia Commons

 

If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell
you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to
honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not
in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the
1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War
and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia Ward
Howe that women must take control of politics from the men who had
permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage
people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to
gain power to change society.

The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in
the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of
heroism discovered that newly invented long-range weapons turned death
into tortured anonymity. Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud,
piled like cordwood in ditches, or withered into emaciated corpses
after dysentery drained their lives away.

The women who had watched their hale and healthy men march off to war
were haunted by its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons, and
brothers. The men who did come home were scarred in both body and
mind.

Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.

But out of the war also came a new sense of empowerment. Women had
bought bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed
farms, harvested fields, worked in war industries, reared children,
and nursed soldiers. When the war ended, they had every expectation
that they would continue to be considered valuable participants in
national affairs, and had every intention of continuing to take part
in them.

But the Fourteenth Amendment, which established that Black men were
citizens, did not explicitly include women in that right. Worse, it
introduced the word “male” into the Constitution when it warned
states against preventing “male inhabitants” from voting. In 1869,
the year after the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution,
women organized two organizations—the National Woman Suffrage
Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association—to promote
women’s right to have a say in American government.

From her home in Boston, Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the
American Woman Suffrage Association. She was an enormously talented
writer who in the early years of the Civil War had penned “The
Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a hymn whose lyrics made it a point to
note that Christ was “born of woman.”

Howe was drawn to women’s rights because the laws of her time meant
that her children belonged to her abusive husband. If she broke free
of him, she would lose any right to see her children, a fact he threw
at her whenever she threatened to leave him. She was not at first a
radical in the mold of reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who believed
that women had a human right to equality with men. Rather, she
believed strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to
perform in the world.

For Howe, the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to
emancipation might justify its terrible bloodshed. The outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was another story. She remembered:

“I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary
character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the
issue having been one which might easily have been settled without
bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, ‘Why do not the
mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of
that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?’”

Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of
motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down
immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the
World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by
resorting to “mutual murder,” she wrote, but women did not have to
accept “proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror.”
Mothers could command their sons, “who owe their life to her
suffering,” to stop the madness.

“Arise, women!” Howe commanded. “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.’”

Howe had her document translated into French, Spanish, Italian,
German, and Swedish and distributed it as widely as her extensive
contacts made possible. She believed that her Women’s Peace Movement
would be the next great development in human history, ending war just
as the antislavery movement had ended human bondage. She called for a
“festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which
should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines” to be held
around the world on June 2 of every year, a date that would permit
open-air meetings.

Howe organized international peace conferences, and American states
developed their own Mothers’ Day festivals. But Howe quickly
realized that there was much to be done before women could come
together on a global scale. She turned her attention to women’s
clubs “to constitute a working and united womanhood.”

As Howe worked to unite women, she came to realize that a woman did
not have to center her life around a man, but rather should be “a
free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human
responsibility.” “This discovery was like the addition of a new
continent to the map of the world,” she later recalled, “or of a
new testament to the old ordinances.” She threw herself into the
struggle for women’s suffrage, understanding that in order to create
a more just and peaceful society, women must take up their rightful
place as equal participants in American politics.

While we celebrate the modern version of Mother’s Day on May 10, in
this momentous year of 2026, it’s worth remembering the original
Mothers’ Day and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must have
the same rights as men, and that they must make their voices heard.

—

Notes:

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Julia Ward Howe, _Reminiscences, 1819-1899_ (Boston: 1900).

Letters from an American, A newsletter about the history behind
today's politics. By Heather Cox Richardson (Over 2,900,000
subscribers)

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* mothers day
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* History
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* Julia Ward Howe
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* US Civil War
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* Women's Suffrage
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* women's rights
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* Franco-Prussian War
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* women's equality
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