Mothers Day Revisited

international | anti-war / imperialism | feature

Saturday May 13, 2006 13:53

by Magdalena from Dun Laoghaire

Mothers Day is a call for women to resist war

A mother with a newborn baby in a Belgrade hospital

This year -- as more and more mothers, in America, Britain, Italy, Spain, Poland as well as Iraq, mourn their fallen sons and daughters, lost to the insanity of organized violence -- Julia Ward Howe's call for women to not allow their men to constantly play at war is back in fashion, part of a growing awareness of the link between patriarchy and war.

Mother's Day weekend is coming – there are anti-capitalist meetings, anti-war meetings and pro-Palestinian demonstrations organised in Dublin this weekend. I thought, however, it would be useful to reprint the 1870 call by American poet and women's leader Julia Ward Howe for the establishment of Mothers Day as a holiday. Particularly as, awareness by even anti-war and left activists is nearly nil that what is now widely viewed as a ‘sentimental tribute to family’ was originally a call for women to wage a general strike to end war.

This year — as more and more mothers, in America, Britain, Italy, Spain, Poland as well as Iraq, mourn their fallen sons and daughters, lost to the insanity of organized violence — Julia Ward Howe's call for women to not allow their men to constantly play at war is back in fashion, part of a growing awareness of the link between patriarchy and war.

Howe's original Mother's Day Proclamation should be the basis for parades, remembrances and other events that try to reclaim the holiday's original spirit in a year when the United States government talks seriously not of avoiding war, but of staying the course on the ones they're already fighting, and, heck, maybe even nuking Iran for good measure.

The radical origins of Mother's Day — as a powerful feminist call against war, penned in the wake of the U.S. Civil War in 1870 — are fully compatible with the universal notion of honouring mothers. Women, even more so now, are the primary sufferers of warfare. In the 20th century, civilian populations bore 90 percent of war's casualties around the world. Mass and indiscriminate attacks, popularised in WWII by the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Allied firebombings in Japan and Germany, and the rape of Nanjing, are only the most spectacular examples of a phenomenon in which women become the bombed, the raped and the famine victims, the refugees, the forgotten statistics in what are invariably the wars of men.

In Iraq, the violence of warfare has also been accompanied by a significant rollback in women's rights under the fundamentalist religious parties that now rule the country. In Afghanistan, the transition from the Taliban to a U.S.-backed thugocracy has done virtually nothing to alleviate the fundamentalist repression of women. In the so-called War on Terror, so far, it is primarily women who have been terrorized. Now, as has been the case throughout history, the suffering of men in war is glorified, and the suffering of women ignored. Howe knew this 136 years ago. Even then, the generals had written our historical memory, in the Civil War and in most popular narratives of the bloody trail of modernizing "Western Civilization."

It's worth remembering that the Civil War, the culmination of a political division that lasted longer and was considered more intractable than today's Palestine/Israel conflict or indefinite "War on Terror," and that killed well over 100 times more people on American soil than the attacks of Sept. 11, was not unanimously lauded at the time. And that women thought they could do something to prevent such bloodshed in the future.

Here is the original, pre-Hallmark, Mother's Day Proclamation, penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your 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 of 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 indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow 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 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 Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and 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.