With our country’s humanity and the earth’s longevity being attacked from seemingly every angle these days, we’ve been thinking a lot about the ways that we can use ordinary civic activism to make our dissenting voices heard. This year, when poking around for Mother’s Day ideas, we came across the story of Julia Ward Howe, an early feminist and pacifist, that tried to establish one of the first incarnations of Mother’s Day, an anti-war demonstration rooted in the idea that as women and mothers, we’re innately humane and have a responsibility to shape and civilize societies through political activism. Ward Howe believed that women bore a special responsibility to care for society’s weak, downtrodden, and cast-off members and to her, the connection between motherhood and women as advocates for social justice was a natural one. Throughout our country’s history women have played key roles in the fight to end slavery, the campaigns to end lynchings, the battle for worker’s rights and the protection of children, and in establishing social welfare for the poor. Now seems like a good time to resurrect that influence and we’d like to imagine a world where there is a day of the year to commemorate our humanity toward people and the planet and the eradication of war.