Appeal to

Womanhood

Throughout the World

 

Julia Ward Howe, 1870  (Click HERE for further informatiion about Howe)

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Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder.

 

Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons.

 

In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field.

 

Thus men have done.  Thus men will do.

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But, women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.

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Arise, then, Christian 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 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.

 

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 does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate 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 council.

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Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.  Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

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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.

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JULIA WARD HOWE - BIOGRAPHY

Julia Ward Howe was a pacifist, feminist, president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, co-founder of General Federation of Women’s Clubs, twice president of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, director of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and head of the Massachusetts Federation of Women’s Clubs.

 

In 1908, Ms. Howe was the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a society dedicated to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art.

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Ms. Howe is well known for "borrowing"/"stealing"/or "rewriting," choose your preference, the Abolitionist movement's anthem, "John Brown's Body," (see below) into order to convert it into "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," (see below), after she and her husband visited Abraham Lincoln at the White House in November 1861.  The song was set to William Steffe's already-existing  Abolitionists' music and Howe's version was published in Atlantic Monthly (see below) in February 1862.  It quickly became a popular with the "Union" side, during the American Civil War, or "War Between the States."

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 Use of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's rural  estate, across the Potomac River from

Washington, D.C., became both controversial and essential;

 as  cemetaries overflowed with dead soldiers' corpses,  posing severe health hazards as they rotted.

 Mrs. Lee's garden was excavated and filled with remains of 2,111 bodies. 

 Freed slaves from the Lee Estate remained on the premises and a sprawling "Freedmen's Village"  of  1,500 sprang to life; complete with new frame houses, schools, churches and development of farms; upon  which Gen. Lee's former slaves grew food for Union soldiers.  

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