At the end of this shameful week in American history, it's good to recall on this Mother's Day its historic beginnings. Linked chiefly with three names — Julia Ward Howe, Anna Reese Jarvis, and Woodrow Wilson — Mother's Day is inseparable from the sad recognition of the bloody cruelties of war. Ours in Iraq today yields images not only of injuries endured but, more worrisome, of those inflicted too. Maybe we owe it to ourselves to ask if it might have been otherwise.
Consider Julia Ward Howe's original "Mother's Day Proclamation" (1870):
Arise, then, 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 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.
Consider, too, the purpose of the first Mother's Day in 1908. Primarily organized to honor the extraordinary memory of Anna Reese Jarvis — an Appalachian mother who organized women to work for better sanitary conditions in the Civil War and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors — the day was meant to prompt women to call for peace in the world as well. Indeed, its aim was an echo of Howe's call: "Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God."*
But consider Woodrow Wilson's 1914 order setting aside Mother's Day officially. In flowery, presidential language about the role mothers play exclusively in American domestic life, Wilson said nothing — nothing — about mothers' promoting peace in the world, much to the disappointment of Anna Jarvis and the admirers of Julia Ward Howe. As Mother's Day became commercialized, Anna Jarvis's own daughter — who never herself became a mother — spent her own energies trying to refocus the day on peacemaking, but it wasn't to happen. By the end of her life she was so saddened that she claimed she was sorry she had ever gotten Mother's Day started.
"Arise, then, women of this day!" Perhaps today there's time to suggest a still more peaceful Sunday.
Thanks for the Howe quote, Styles. Your posting is both timely and pointed, given the past week. It's beyond irony that one of the young soldiers in those photos is 5 months pregnant and looking toward motherhood.
Posted by John on May 10, 2004 08:00 PM
And special thanks for reminding those of us who are mothers of the sacred obligation we bear to the sons and daughters of all.
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Consider, too, the purpose of the first Mother's Day in 1908. Primarily organized to honor the extraordinary memory of Anna Reese Jarvis — an Appalachian mother who organized women to work for better sanitary conditions in the Civil War and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors — the day was meant to prompt women to call for peace in the world as well. Indeed, its aim was an echo of Howe's call: "Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God."
