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Hello my happy readers. I have an impulsive, yet mankind enlightening, epiphany which is my new found mission from God. I have recently been exposed to people from our history who were Bad-ass Bitches at fighting the exact same social wars, corporate wars, and elitist government issues that we currently are. It is more than uncanny. It’s a crystal ball that shows us our past, and we are the future trapped inside of it.

These people were smart, as we are smart.

Determined, as were are determined.

They had a lot to lose, and do we.

Julia Ward Howe was a heck of a role model. We need more good role models. The next few post are going to be about people who are fascinating and were highly influential for their time.

How does this relate to being on welfare and living in poverty? Because we need role models, too. People who want to improve not only themselves, but bring the whole world up to a higher standard with them. I will begin with Julia Ward Howe, because yesterday was Mother’s Day and she should get a little credit for inventing that!

US feminist, reformer, and writer Julia Ward Howe was born May 27, 1819 in New York City. She married Samuel Gridley Howe of Boston, a physician and social reformer. After the Civil War, she campaigned for women rights, anti-slavery, equality, and for world peace. She published several volumes of poetry, travel books, and a play. She became the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1908. She was an ardent antislavery activist who wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic in 1862, sung to the tune of John Brown’s Body. She wrote a biography in 1883 of Margaret Fuller, who was a prominent literary figure and a member of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalists. She died in 1910.      (thank you)

She also wrote this amazing Mother’s Day Proclamation below. It is beautiful, inspiring, instigating an annual event . So, take 3 minutes of your life, and let us expand and grow together as a species. After I read it, I started writing this as my literary response to greatness. To say it is a motivational piece, would be a significant understatement.

Oh yeah, it is also the catalyst for Mother’s Day. Don’t you dare give the credit to Hallmark!

Peace.

Mother’s Day Proclamation
by Julia Ward Howe*, 1870

The First Mother’s Day proclaimed in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe
was a passionate demand for disarmament and peace.

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!

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 taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another 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. Blood not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow 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. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail & commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesars but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.