Mothers' Day was once a strike for peace

In Britain, the fourth Sunday of Lent (Mid-Lent, typically in March or early April) was known as Mothering Sunday, when furmety, a sweetened boiled cereal dish, was often served at the family dinner. Originally, it was a time for visiting one's ‘mother church' – the church in the town where one hailed from, and people would travel back home to attend – but gradually came to be a day for honouring one’s mother and giving her gifts. Thus, it is the progenitor of today’s Mothers' Day.

It is believed that Mothers’ Day emerged from the custom of mother worship in ancient Greece. Mother worship, which kept a festival to Cybele, a great mother of gods, and Rhea, the wife of Cronus, was held on March 15 to March 18 around Asia Minor.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe (pictured), prominent United States abolitionist, social activist, and women's suffrage campaigner, pacifist and poet, author of Battle Hymn of the Republic, was the first to proclaim Mothers' Day.

This is the text of Julia Ward Howe's first proclamation for Mothers' Day (long before Hallmark Cards and others watered down the intention that the day would be a general strike for peace):

Arise, then, women of this 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 of 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 of murder is not the balance of justice!

This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click May 9 this time, as that's where I placed it for Mothers' Day, 2004.