Mother’s Day means more than celebrating mothers

The history of today’s holiday is more relevant than ever

My family lost our mom to cancer in 2016, which led me to dedicate my thanks on today’s holiday to the mothers among my friends, siblings, and in-laws.

Expanding my celebration of today’s holiday beyond my own mother reminded me of the roots of Mother’s Day. They emerge not only in celebrations of mothers within and across families, but also a set of convictions that once united mothers in the face of a shared threat to their children.

Mother’s Day’s forgotten roots

Mother’s Day was first recognized as an official holiday in 1914, through a proclamation by then President Woodrow Wilson. Its origins, however, stem from a previous proclamation in 1870 by social justice advocate and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe. 

Howe worked as a nurse during the Civil War, and witnessed its carnage first hand. Recognizing that war not only maimed and killed soldiers, but also wounded military (and other) families, she remarkably worked with widows and orphans in both the North and South. Her proclamation reflects her recognition of the shared humanity offended by war.

She wrote:

“Arise, then… women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!
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 devastated 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 vindicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough 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 council.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means
whereby the great human family can live in peace,
each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask
that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality,
may be appointed and held at some place 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, 1870

Source: The Peace Alliance, available at https://peacealliance.org/history-of-mothers-day-as-a-day-of-peace-julia-ward-howe/

The prescience of Howe’s plea for peace

The First World War erupted about 50 years after Howe issued her historic proclamation, and just three years after President Wilson announced the national holiday inspired by it. That war was remarkable for many reasons.

WWI was the first time in history when the sophisticated machinery of the Industrial Revolution was turned to maiming & killing. Largely because tools like tanks and machine guns reduced experienced soldiers to literal cannon fodder, the First World War was fought largely by children. The British Army alone recruited and deployed nearly a quarter million child soldiers.

A powerful song, “Children’s Crusade,” recalls this sad and disturbing history. Sting’s lyrics include:

Young men, soldiers, nineteen fourteen
Marching through countries they'd never seen
Virgins with rifles, a game of charades
All for a children's crusade

Pawns in the game are not victims of chance
Strewn on the fields of Belgium and France
Poppies for young men, death's bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed

Mothers at the time had many reasons to speak out—not only about the particular conflict that ended or ruined the lives of millions of their children, but also the concept of militarism itself that enabled the war in the first place.

Forgotten legacies

The legacy of World War I included the Second World War, which was made effectively inevitable by the punitive sanctions on Germany imposed by the victorious Allied powers at the end of WWI.

Meanwhile, the legacy of the Second World War was (at least supposed to be) the creation of international law, and international institutions to enforce it. If the First World War represented the first time mechanized tools were used to destroy human life en masse, the Second World War represented the first time that nation states agreed to rules that would bind them all in the service of protecting the rights of their individual citizens.

I’ve written before about how America’s idiotic resignation of executive accountability for torture—under President Obama—effectively lost the Second World War, 60 years after our nation militarily triumphed over the axis powers. Not only were the Nazis funded and equipped by American businesses, but America ultimately came to embrace some methods pioneered by Nazi germany—from the industrial slave labor strategy visible in contemporary mass incarceration, to the dedication of government-funded research and development to building ever more sophisticated weapons.

Beyond an opportunity to celebrate the people whose care and devotion made each of our lives possible, Mother’s Day is also an opportunity to remember that life is the opposite of destruction, and that the militarism dedicated to destruction ultimately offends all of us.

If nothing else, Mother’s Day must entail a rejection of genocide, unless one is willing to reduce it to a Hallmark holiday. Given America’s crass and consistent commercialization of holidays from Valentine’s Day to Juneteenth, however, such amnesia is ultimately on brand.

Paid subscribers can access a poem I wrote for my mother in the weeks before she was taken from us. I share it sometimes with friends grieving their own parents, and have heard from many of them that it has offered them some solace.