A woman's place is in the struggle: The first vision for Mother's Day

May 7, 2003
Issue 

As the catalogues advertising cheap slippers, saucepans and vacuum cleaners drop into our letterboxes, it might be worth remembering that the woman widely credited with initiating Mother's Day, Julia Ward Howe, would be horrified by the marketing exercise it has become. A passionate anti-slavery campaigner and US feminist, Howe called in 1870 for a day in which mothers could unite and demand peace in the world.

Howe was not a pacifist, but an opponent of unjust and unnecessary wars. Like many of her generation of women's liberation campaigners, Howe first become politically involved in campaigning against slavery. Along with her husband Samuel, Howe edited the Boston anti-slavery periodical The Commonwealth from 1851 to 1853.

Throughout her life, Howe maintained that there were two "great causes" — the struggle for equality and the struggle for peace.

When the southern US states attempted to secede from the union in 1861, Howe believed the resulting war should completely abolish slavery. While Howe's involvement with the northern war effort gave her a deep revulsion for war, it did not shake her conviction that the US Civil War was necessary to avoid further suffering.

In 1862 she published the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and dedicated it to union soldiers. Its final line was a call to arms: "As [Christ] died to make men holy, let us die to make them free."

Like many woman abolitionists, Howe became intensely frustrated with the sexist obstacles she faced. Her husband believed women should be "private people", and resisted her taking a public campaigning role. He (mis)managed her finances and threatened to deny her access to her children if she divorced him.

In 1868, Howe co-founded the New England Suffrage Association. The following year, the suffrage movement split over the question of whether to campaign against the proposed 14th amendment to the US constitution, which would permanently enfranchise black men while not enfranchising women. Howe believed black men's enfranchisement was too important to risk losing.

By 1870, Howe had turned her attention to the prevention of war. Revolted by the Franco-Prussian war, which she saw as a war for territory in which thousands of people died, she called for a national day of mothers' struggle to highlight the barbarity of war.

She wrote a Mother's Day proclamation, which read: "Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts ... Say firmly: 'We will not have great 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.'

"From the bosom of the devasted earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, 'Disarm, disarm!' The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

"As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace."

Howe argued that Mothers' Day should be set for June 2, which in the US summer is warm enough to hold marches and picnics. She was influenced by the ideas of Anna Reeves Jarvis, an activist in the Civil War who worked to reduce death by disease on both sides through "mothers' work days". In Boston and a few other US cities, Mothers' Day for peace was celebrated for around a decade on June 2.

After Howe's death, the Mothers' Day mantle was taken up by Jarvis' daughter, also called Anna, who promoted the day as one of celebration, rather than protest. By 1912, US retailers had picked up on the concept, as a way to sell more products, and the holiday was moved to a more convenient time for them, the second Sunday in May.

The commercial retailers' fest that represents Mothers Day today, along with its underlying message that all women's ills can be eased by a good shopping spree, is a world away from Howe's vision of a day in which women joined together in struggle. Howe's idea of a perfect Mothers Day gift wasn't a toaster. It was justice, equality and peace in our lifetime.

BY ALISON DELLIT

[The author is a member of the Parramatta branch of the Socialist Alliance.]

From Green Left Weekly, May 7, 2003.
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