Motherhood (and Peace?)

"I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace." -Julia Ward Howe, from her "Mother’s Day Proclamation"

This year as I began to think about what I might preach about on Mother’s Day, it occurred to me that perhaps this holiday has become a little bit, well, for lack of a better word, sappy. (In fairness, and in the interest of gender balance, let me just say that, cynic that I can sometimes be, I don’t care much for Father’s Day, either.)

Not that sending cards and flowers or giving gifts to someone you love is such a bad thing; indeed, I highly recommend it: just not only on some particular day of the year. Mother’s Day is, I think, especially prone to be oversentimentalized, and that is exactly what has happened, for the most part. It’s gotten sappy.

(Not all of our experiences of Mother are positive, for one thing. But, let’s not go there this morning, other than to acknowledge that it’s a fact.)

Mother’s Day, which actually started out as an international day of peace, has been so commercialized and watered down and sentimentalized that I suspect most people have no idea of its real origins.

In fact, Mother’s Day as we know it was the brainchild of a Unitarian woman, Julia Ward Howe--ironically better known for her authorship of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" than for her efforts on behalf of peace. (Suffice it to say that she was passionately opposed to slavery, too, and was thus an ardent supporter of the Union cause during the Civil War. And, anyway, as Emerson famously wrote, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.") In addition to her work for the Unitarian and abolitionist causes, Howe was the director of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, the founder of the first American women ministers group, and a popular poet.

Mother’s Day originated out of Howe’s opposition to the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870’s, which she and a few other enlightened peace activists of the time saw as a particularly senseless conflict. Howe actually wrote a manifesto against that war which was translated into five languages, intending to deliver it at international peace conferences in London and Paris.

But because she was a woman (and here is a very good example of why we should never oversentimentalize Mother’s Day), she was ultimately prevented from participating in those conferences. Upon returning home to the United States, Howe conceived the idea of an international Mother’s Day, to, as she put it, "promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace."

No group, she believed, could "more naturally or persuasively sponsor an annual festival of peace" [Forrest Church]. Howe issued her Mother’s Day proclamation, which we read from responsively this morning, on June 2, 1872. As my colleague Forrest Church wrote in the morning’s reading, "Mother’s Day would remind us that the whole world would be a better place if only everyone might rise to the challenge of motherhood: nurturing life, fostering peace, giving love."

As Howe herself wrote in the Proclamation, "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 to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Ceasar, but of God."

For one who, like myself, has come to believe that we must ultimately transcend national, ethnic, and sectarian boundaries if we hope to bring about meaningful and peaceful change in the world, Howe’s international perspective resonates powerfully. She was ahead of her time in recognizing the corrosive effects of nationalism. In terms of nationalism’s central role in the terrible and destructive history of the 20th century and beyond, she was prescient.

Mothers don’t deserve to be oversentimentalized, of course, any more than anyone else. My maternal great grandmother and grandmother were Normal School graduates who were both trained to be teachers at at time when few career possibilties existed for women. Though neither, to my knowledge, taught school for very long, both were hard workers, my grandmother Gertrude working as a cook and housecleaner until well into her 80’s. She had no choice, as her husband was not particularly successful, and she had to help support her four children. ( A fifth child, her first, had died in her lap of pneumonia at around age 4.)

My paternal grandmother, who lived to be 100 years old, was a registered nurse: another of the limited number of vocations open to women at the turn of the 20th century. She left Nova Scotia at age sixteen and came to Boston on her own to study nursing at Mass General Hospital. Ultimately, she became a head nurse at McLean Hospital in Belmont, where she met my grandfather, who was a nursing student at the time. She would later work to support him while he attended medical school at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia (women, of course, weren’t particularly welcome). Together, they would run a hospital in their home in Castine, Maine, where my grandfather eventually settled into a medical practice. She was an incredibly hard worker.

You can see that I come from a family of strong women. But it gets better--or worse, depending on how you look at it! My mother also became a teacher--my own teacher, much to my chagrin at the time, for two years of elementary school--and, oh by the way, the breadwinner in our family--a story for another day. Suffice it to say that I always took it for granted that women worked outside of the home.

My sister, too, will be retiring at the end of this year from a 30-odd year career as a Middle School teacher in Lewiston, Maine. Anyone who has worked with Middle Schoolers, or who knows anything about Lewiston, will understand that this woman is no wimp.

(And, oh, lest I forget to mention it, my wife Sabrina is a teacher, too, and no wimp, either.)

Women have always worked, of course. Housework is not easy. Raising children is not easy. And even today, when most women do work outside of the home, they still often take the larger share of childrearing and housework responsibilities. They also are still paid less than men, on average. These are facts, and it is even worse if a woman is a mother. According the "The Motherhood Manifesto,"

Mothers are 44% less likely to be hired than non-mothers who have the same resume, esperience, and qualifications, and mothers are offered significantly lower starting pay [approximately $11,000 less on average].

Julia Ward Howe knew all of this. She had a far more elevated and ambitious view of women’s power and responsibility than was generally predominant in the Victorian Age. She believed that mothers should witness publically to the maternal values of care and nurture and love and peace and take a stand against war and violence. Perhaps she was overly optimistic and idealistic about it, but she truly believed that they could make a difference.

Mother’s Day thus started out with very much of a political intent, and politics make many of us uncomfortable. As the negative response to Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war activity in the last year demonstrates, politically inspired mothers make some of us especially uncomfortable. No wonder that Mother’s Day so quickly became the domesticated and tame holiday that we now know it to be.

But it seems to me that we do Howe’s vision and our mothers a disservice when we fail to acknowledge the original purpose of Mother’s Day. As the fourth year of our apparent folly in Iraq begins to unfold, and the terrible and senseless violence there escalates, and the failure of force is demonstrated once again, perhaps the mothers of the world could once again show us the way toward a saner and more peaceful future. As Forrest Church wrote in the morning’s reading,

With war-driven and domestic violence just as pervasive and far more deadly than it was a century and a half ago, perhaps we should con- sider reopening Julia Ward Howe’s book and sending peace cards on Mother’s Day, perhaps even finding ways to commit ourselves to the effort of working for a more peaceful world, which can onlly be accomplished one neighbor at a time. Mother’s Day will then be celebrated in the spirit its founder intended. As Julia Ward Howe would have been the first to remind us, it’s about time.

Come, thou fount of every vision, lift our eyes to what may come.
See the lion and the young lamb dwell together in thy home.
Hear the cries of war fall silent, feel our love glow like the sun.
When we all serve one another, then our heaven is begun.

Come, thou fount of inspiration, turn our lives to higher ways.
Lift our gloom and desperation, show the promise of this day.
Help us bind ourselves in union, help our hands tell of our love.
With thine aid, O fount of justice, earth be fair as heav’n above.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock