Mother’s Day got its start on Beacon Street in the Back Bay celebrating not only mothers but peace.

Julia Ward Howe, who lived most of her life at 241 Beacon Street, began advocating a “Mother’s Day” in the 1870s.

The ancient Greeks held spring ceremonies for Rhea, mother of gods, and in the 1600s the English had a “Mothering Day”, where servants were given the fourth Sunday of Lent off to bring cakes to their mothers.

America’s Mother’s Day, however, started with Howe.

Howe was not an average mother. She was an activist, an abolitionist, a women’s suffrage advocate and a writer who clashed with her prominent transcendentalist husband Samuel Gridley Howe over his wish that she shun public life. According to her diary, he beat her. She considered divorcing him on various occasions but never did.

Howe is best known for writing the militant words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, the unofficial song of the Union Army. Following the carnage of the war and the 1870 outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, however, Howe changed her tune.

In 1870, she penned the Mother’s Day Proclamation, exhorting women to press for peace. Howe’s Mother’s Day was not intended as a day for children to honor mothers, but as a mens for mothers to leversge maternity and marriage against war.

“Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage; For caresses and applause”, she wrote. “Our sons will not be taken from us to unlearn; All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience; We the women of one country; Will be too tender of those of another country; To allow our sons to be trained in injure theirs”.

Throughout the 1870s, Howe pushed the pacifying benefits of motherhood at Mother’s Peace Day observances held annually on the second Sunday of June at the Church of Disciples in Boston. She lobbied for formal recognition of this “Mother’s Day for Peace”, but was not immediately successful.

Howe’s effort was influenced by the work of Ann Jarvis, a West Virginian who started what she called “Mother’s Work Days” to improve sanitation conditions in Civil War camps. In the early 1900s, Jarvis’ daughter, Anna Jarvis, was aware of Howe’s work and began her own campaign to establish an official Mother’s Day.

Jarvis first convinced the West Virginia Church that her mother had intended to celebrate the day on the anniversary of the elder Jarvis’ death, the second Sunday of May. Following lobbying by Jarvis and supporters, most states celebrated the holiday by 1911. Mother’s Day quickly shed its pacifist origins for a less complicated appreciation of mothers. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday.