Having recently retired from paid employment, I decided that now was the time to apply myself to the much more important task of bringing peace to the world. Looking around, it wasn’t immediately obvious which way to turn so I opted to join the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, not fully realising that they had already been working hard to promote peace for virtually 100 years.
Undaunted, I decided to get active. Mother’s Day was approaching, not that this appealed to me in itself as I had always maintained that it was a totally commercialised piece of nonsense and that I did appreciate and honour my own mother on most of the days of the year. But being confronted by endless advertising as to how to give Mother some wonderful (expensive) gift – French perfume, a boxed arrangement of gorgeous exotic flowers, a visit to a Massage Parlour, a new dishwasher, a brand new car, la, la, la. I decided that women needed to be reminded of the origin of Mother’s Day.
The printer produced 100 copies of Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation and I set out with the intention of offering copies to all the Mothers who would be flocking to enjoy the goings-on in Glebe Park. The plan had been to give them some simple information about the capacity of women to contribute to achieving peace in the world and wake up to the real evils of war.
Funnily enough, no-one seemed very interested and after less than 20 minutes in the Park, I was approached by a stern, female, Security Person in uniform, who marched me over to the Park Entrance and sent me packing: “this is no place to be handing out leaflets, so kindly go on your way!” So with about 95 leaflets in hand I went on my way and the Glebe Park Mothers were none-the-wiser. But I was!