Letters from an American - May 11, 2024
Episode Date: May 12, 2024Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe...
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May 11, 2024. If you googled a 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 Mother's 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 writer and reformer Julia Ward Howe that women must
take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mother's 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 society. The Civil War years
taught naive Americans what mass death meant in the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to
war with fantasies of heroism discovered that newly invented long-range weapons
turned death into tortured anonymity. Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like
cordwood in ditches, or withered into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives away.
The women who had watched their hale and healthy men march off to war were haunted by its results.
They lost fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers.
The men who did come home were scarred in both 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 expectation
that they would continue to be considered valuable participants
in national affairs and had every intention of continuing to take part in them.
But the 14th Amendment, which established that black men were citizens, did not explicitly
include women in that right. Worse, it introduced the word male into the Constitution when it warned states against preventing male inhabitants from voting.
In 1869, the year after the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution,
women organized two organizations, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman 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
Suffrage Association. She was an enormously talented writer who in the early years of the
Civil War had penned the Battle Hymn of the Republic, 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, who believed 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?
How 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, she wrote.
But women did not have to accept proceedings which fill the
globe with grief and horror. Mothers could command their sons, who owe their life to her suffering,
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.
tax 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 Mother's Day and which should be devoted to the
advocacy of peace doctrines to be held around the world on June 2nd of every year, a date that
would permit open-air meetings. Howe organized international peace conferences, and American
states developed their own Mother's Day festivals. But Howe quickly realized that there was much to
be done before women could come together on a global scale. She turned her attention to women's clubs to constitute a working and united
womanhood. As Howe worked to unite women, she came to realize that a woman did not have to center her
life around a man, but rather should be a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right
and every human responsibility. This discovery was like the addition of a new
continent to the map of the world, she later recalled, or of a new testament to the old
ordinances. 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.
While we celebrate the modern version
of Mother's Day on May 12th,
in this momentous year of 2024,
it's worth remembering the original Mother's Day
and Julia Ward Howe's conviction
that women must have the same rights as men and that they
must make their voices heard. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions,
Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.