We Were Supposed to Be Mothering the World
It’s time to revive the original principles of a day for mothers
a young boy
in my garden
is bailing out water
from his flower patch
when I ask him why
he tells me
young seeds that have not seen sun
forget
and drown easily.
Last week, a white mom hurled racial slurs at a five-year-old Black boy on a playground and then raised over half-a-million dollars by positioning herself online as the victim. A father was taken into custody while getting gas and driven away by agents, who left his children alone in his truck, which sat abandoned in front of the gas pump. Had a parent left a child alone in a car, as law enforcement did here, they could have faced criminal charges. A mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter were arrested, after her daughter was pinned, face down on the ground by armed officers, as her sister tried to help, while also protecting her own newborn baby. I keep a running list at the bottom of the same document where I write these notes, tallying the various orders and policies that are actively harming children. The list gets longer every day.
Today was also Mother’s Day.
While mothers certainly deserve a day of rest given all we expect of them, I have difficulty reconciling this holiday with the many ways we tolerate harm toward children and women. But the incongruities of this day only exist within the framework we currently apply to the holiday, which, like most commercialized holidays, has strayed pretty far from its original principles. The origin of Mother’s Day tells a very different story and begs deeper reflection and wider care. It is a history worth revisiting and reviving.
Though there are iterations of Mother’s Day in other countries and throughout history, the holiday’s origins in the United States trace back to two women who, in their own ways, each sought to elevate the labor of mothers, not only in caring for their own children, but in caring for their communities and for the world. Julia Ward Howe, who was an abolitionist, a suffragist, and an advocate for peace during and after The American Civil War, originally conceived of Mother’s Day as a day, not of rest and reward, but of action. She envisioned an international gathering of women, who would work toward peaceful solutions to global conflicts. Howe issued an appeal for “a general congress of women” to work toward, “the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” Her call to action is now known as the Mother’s Day Proclamation, and over time as she sought to make this vision come to life, she came to refer to this gathering of women as Mother’s Day for Peace.
While Howe’s ambition never came to full fruition, the underlying concept of the current Mother’s Day holiday took hold through a desire to memorialize another woman, who also lived through The American Civil War, and very demonstrably enacted the values that Howe laid out. At around the same time Howe was advocating for a Day of Peace, Ann Jarvis, an Appalachian mother, who had lost multiple children to deadly diseases like measles, was organizing mothers in her community to build a national public health movement, so children would be protected from the tragedies her own endured. Like Howe, she also became an advocate for care and peace during and after the war, nursing soldiers and later working to heal fractured communities, again by organizing mothers. When Mother’s Day first became an official holiday in the United States in 1914, it was as a result of the efforts of her daughter, Anna, who saw a day honoring mothers as a way to pay homage to her own. Though Ann Jarvis’s daughter did not have the same lofty goals for the day that Howe originally conceived, she was dismayed, even in the early decades of celebration, by the commercialization that quickly seeped into a day that she viewed with great seriousness—so much so that she tried to have the holiday rescinded.
It does not seem a coincidence that these women, who conceptualized a day set aside to recognize and activate the work of mothers as agents of peace in the world, were imagining the possibilities of this work, and of honoring it, in the shadow of a war that tore the country apart and forced the nation to reckon with its deepest cruelties and injustices. And today, as echoes of those cruelties are increasingly loud—as a child is publicly labeled with a slur that finds its roots in the violence and dehumanization of slavery, as families are terrorized by agents who seem to draw their mandate from the shadowy historical directives of the Fugitive Slave Act, and as children are once again dying of the very diseases that Ann Jarvis sought to protect them from over a hundred and fifty years ago—we are in a renewed moment of reckoning.
As we continue to grapple in deadly ways with the jagged edges that form our deepest national fault lines today, perhaps it is time to revisit the principles that motivated Julia Ward Howe and Ann Jarvis to mobilize mothers of another century toward peace, justice, and care. Perhaps it’s time to reconstitute a holiday that is largely marked by commercial signifiers of luxury and relaxation and turn, instead, to its roots in the vital work of bringing about peace and of caring, not only for our own children, but for the world's children.
And, perhaps, this time, this work need not only fall to mothers.
The labor involved in care still resides primarily with women more than a century after Howe and Jarvis sought to harness this commonality into a unified force for wider communal and global good. Whether caring for one’s own children, for aging parents, or working in care giving professions, tending to the vulnerable remains largely in women’s hands.
Women are not uniquely qualified to provide care. Though women are the primary care givers in many cultures, there are also examples in the anthropological and sociological record of communities that demonstrate the potential for men to take an equal or even primary role in caregiving. As someone who spent part of my own childhood raised by a single father, and as an educator who has been mentored by, worked beside, and supervised extraordinary male teachers in early childhood classrooms, I am confident that anyone can give care and find their place in a movement of care. The example I began with—a white mother lashing out at a Black child on a playground—is also a reminder that women are capable of inflicting harm and of dehumanizing other people’s children, just as men are.
But, while women may not be uniquely qualified to provide care or to bring about peace, as Howe proposed when she originally conceived of a Mother’s Day for Peace, I do think it remains true that many of our deepest and most overwhelmingly systemic wounds could be healed by radically reconsidering the way we value caregiving, the way we value women, the way we value children, and the ease with which we accept care as a luxury for some rather than a right for all. When we create narratives and traditions that position care as a luxury, it becomes all too easy to expect and turn our eyes away from cruelty and inequity.
Additionally, to support Howe’s original mission of peace and the community mobilizing and healing work of Ann Jarvis, there is also evidence that peace is more likely to be realized, even in the most dire circumstances, when women are involved in the peacemaking process. In fact, including women in the peace process in zones of conflict makes it 64% more likely that peace will be achieved and—this is especially important—35% more likely that peace will be sustainable, lasting more than fifteen years. This has been shown in studies that spanned conflicts across cultures including Europe, Africa, and Central America. There is also emerging evidence that training mothers to detect the warning signs of radicalization in children and “provide counternarratives in the home” mitigates the chances of children becoming part of violent extremist groups. (I would link to the US Institute for Peace’s summary on the role of women in preventing violent extremism, but the page that addresses this work is no longer accessible, following the forcible takeover of this non-partisan, non-profit organization.) Women are not inherently perfect ambassadors for peace, nor should the burden of reaching and sustaining peace fall solely to women. But it is clear that leaving women out of the conversation—through exclusion or by positioning motherhood as confined to protecting one’s own family—puts us all at greater risk and facilitates deeper and more prolonged harm to children across the globe.
We have yet to live up to the vision of Julia Ward Howe or to the example of Ann Jarvis. But I think we need to renew their calls to honor and engage with the work of mothering the entire world, not only our own families—to commit to mobilizing and healing our communities and the communities that struggle beyond our own direct awareness or reach. As Audre Lorde reminded us, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
Wishing us all, not only a day, but a lifetime of care as well as the fortitude to care for those we cannot see, whose children are just as tender as our own,
Alicia
A few organizations that support mothers…
A few things I found helpful and hopeful this week…
If you think someone else in your life might need some hope, please share. It’s always easier to hold onto hope when we’re not doing it alone.
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