 Mother's Day for Peace
By Ruth Rosen
(5-10-07)
Honor Mother with Rallies
in the Streets.
The holiday began in activism; it needs rescuing from commercialism and platitudes.
Every year, people snipe at the shallow commercialism of Mother's Day. But to
ignore your mother on this holy holiday is unthinkable. And if you are a mother,
you're supposed to be devastated if your ingrates fail to honor you at least
one day of the year.
Mother's Day wasn't always like this... because Mother's Day began as a holiday
that commemorated women's public activism, not as a celebration of a mother's
devotion to her family.
The story begins in 1858 when a community activist named Anna Reeves Jarvis organized
Mothers' Works Days in West Virginia. Her immediate goal was to improve sanitation
in Appalachian communities. During the Civil War, Jarvis pried women from their
families to care for the wounded on both sides. Afterward she convened meetings
to persuade men to lay aside their hostilities.
In 1872, Julia Ward Howe, author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic",
proposed an annual Mother's Day for Peace. Committed to abolishing war, Howe
wrote: "Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage.. 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".
For the next 30 years, Americans celebrated Mothers' Day for Peace on June 2.
Many middle-class women in the 19th century believed that they bore a special
responsibility as actual or potential mothers to care for the casualties of society
and to turn America into a more civilized nation. They played a leading role
in the abolitionist movement to end slavery. In the following decades, they launched
successful campaigns against lynching and consumer fraud and battled for improved
working conditions for women and protection for children, public health services
and social welfare assistance to the poor. To the activists, the connection between
motherhood and the fight for social and economic justice seemed self-evident.
In 1913, Congress declared the second Sunday in May to be Mother's Day. By then,
the growing consumer culture had successfully redefined women as consumers for
their families. Politicians and businessmen eagerly embraced the idea of celebrating
the private sacrifices made by individual mothers. As the Florists' Review, the
industry's trade journal, bluntly put it, " This was a holiday that could
be exploited."... Since then, Mother's Day has ballooned into a billion-dollar
industry.
Americans may revere the idea of motherhood and love their own mothers, but not
all mothers. Poor, unemployed mothers may enjoy flowers, but they also need child
care, job training, health care, a higher minimum wage and paid parental leave.
Working mothers may enjoy breakfast in bed, but they also need the kind of governmental
assistance provided by every other industrialized society.
With a little imagination, we could restore Mother's Day as a holiday that celebrates
women's political engagement in society. During the 1980's, some peace groups
gathered at nuclear test sites on Mother's Day to protest the arms race. Today,
our greatest threat is not from missilies but from our indifference toward human
welfare and the health of our planet.
Imagine, if you can, an annual Million Mother March in the nation's capital Imagine
a Mother's Day filled with voices demanding social and economic justice and a
sustainable future,....public activism does not preclude private expressions
of love and gratitude. (Nor does it prevent people from expressing their appreciation
all year round.)
|
