Carl,
Is the Anna Jarvis whom she mentions, related to you?
Miriam
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American
<heathercoxrichardson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2020 12:21 AM
To: miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: May 9, 2020
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that
Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But
“Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the
plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death
caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women
that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such
carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to
their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern
society.
May 9, 2020
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9AExxhJ0> Heather Cox Richardson
May 10
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that
Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But
“Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the
plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death
caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women
that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such
carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to
their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern
society.
The 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.
But out of the war also came a new sense of empowerment. Women had bought
bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed farms, harvested
fields, worked in war industries, reared children, and nursed soldiers. When
the war ended, they had every intention of continuing to participate in
national affairs. But the Fourteenth Amendment, which established that
African American men were citizens, did not include women. In 1869, women
organized the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and the
American Woman’s Suffrage Association to promote women’s right to have a say
in American government.
From her home in Boston, Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the American
Woman’s Suffrage Association. She was an enormously talented writer, who had
penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic in the early years of the Civil War,
a hymn whose lyrics made it a point to note that Christ was “born of woman.”
Howe was drawn to women’s 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.
"Arise, women! Howe commanded. 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.”
Howe had her document translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and
Swedish, and distributed it as widely as her extensive contacts made
possible. She believed that her Women’s Peace Movement would be the next
great development in human history, ending war just as the anti-slavery
movement had ended human bondage. She called for a “festival which should be
observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of
peace doctrines” to be held around the world on June 2 of every year, a date
that would permit open-air meetings.
Howe organized international peace conferences and American states developed
their own Mothers’ Day festivals. But Howe quickly gave up on her project.
She realized that there was much to be done before women could come together
on such a momentous scale. She turned her attention to women’s clubs “to
constitute a working and united womanhood.”
As she worked to unite women, she threw herself into the struggle for
women’s 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 Mother’s Day in this
momentous year of 2020, it’s worth remembering the original Mothers’ Day,
and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must make their voices heard.
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