General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe origin of Mothers' Day - Heather Cox Richardson
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-7-2022The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of heroism discovered that long-range weapons turned death into tortured anonymity. Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, or transformed into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives away.
The women who had watched their men march off to war were haunted by its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons. The men who did come home were scarred in body and mind.
Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.
Howe was drawn to womens rights because the laws of her time meant that her children belonged to her abusive husband. If she broke free of him, she would lose any right to see her children, a fact he threw at her whenever she threatened to leave him. She was not at first a radical in the mold of reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, believing that women had a human right to equality with men. Rather, she believed strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to perform in the world.
For Howe, the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to emancipation might justify its terrible bloodshed. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was another story. She remembered:
"I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?
Howe had a new vision, she said, of the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities. She sat down immediately and wrote an Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World. Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to mutual murder. But women did not have to accept this state of affairs, she wrote. Mothers could command their sons to stop the madness.
As she worked to unite women, she threw herself into the struggle for womens suffrage, understanding that in order to create a more just and peaceful society, women must take up their rightful place as equal participants in American politics.
Perhaps Anna Jarvis remembered seeing her mother participate in an original American Mothers Day when she decided to honor her own mother in the early twentieth century. And while we celebrate modern Mothers Day, in this momentous year of 2022 its worth remembering the original Mothers Day and Julia Ward Howes conviction that women must make their voices heard.
EYESORE 9001
(25,783 posts)My cynical self always assumed the origins had more to do with merchandising, although that came along inevitably.
SouthernIrish
(512 posts)Anna was born into a prominent Dr's family. She took her thoughts on recognition of all Mothers to her church, then to her town council, then to the Governor's office in WV. She was adamant that it not ever be commercialized and spent her inheritance fighting commercialization of the holiday. She died penniless after a long tireless fight. She said that the best way to honor one's Mother was to spend time with her. Mothers wanted and needed that more than any material item. She was also a Suffragette and I am so proud to have her as a ancestor.
We still have the story typed out in the 40's by one of her nieces.
erronis
(14,853 posts)you might scan it and post on a public server. Of course it could be a bit too personal.
Thank you.