A History Lesson
Friends,
As you know, I spent the better part of last week thinking about mothers.
Appropriately, this past weekend, my daughter, Lotus, and I had a mother/daughter overnight campout in the woods with her "coming of age, sisterhood, nature" group of girls and their mothers.
To be truthful, I had some trepidation. I'd neither slept in the woods nor in a tent since 9 years old. Moreover, the weather was set to dip into the 30s (F) that night, making matters worse.
Of course, it was fantastic. Bonding with my daughter and a whole group of moms that I hadn't known before our daughters joined this 3-year program. We cooked together, ate together, built fires, and played games. In a mom's only circle, we laughed, cried, and held each other up when sharing the mothering struggles in these times.
Despite our joyful interaction, I could not help thinking about the mothers of Ukraine. So many --not by choice--are also sleeping, possibly in tents or just on the ground. However, they do so with no promise of a hot shower and their cozy bed the next night. There is no assurance of safety for their husbands, sons, brothers, or fathers as they flee their country with their children in tow. Others are stuck, hiding in makeshift shelters, with bombs falling all around.
It is unfathomable that we are witnessing it in this day and age and that they are LIVING IT.
In addition to Ukraine, many girls also talked about the imminent probability "Roe v. Wade" would soon be overturned. Though young teens, they discussed what that would mean for so many women in this country. All had the sense that, fifty years later, we are moving backward.
As the saying goes, "those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it."
Circling back to Mother's Day, I didn't learn the true origin and history of mother's day until I had become one.
Mother's Day or "Mothering Day" is celebrated in over 40 countries. Here, in the United States, the creation of a national Mother's Day is primarily attributed to three women: Ann Reeves Jarvis, her daughter, Anna M. Jarvis, and Julia Ward Howe.
Ann Reeves Jarvis, a lifelong activist, organized "Mothers' Day Work Clubs" to educate mothers and combat the high infant mortality rates where she lived in Appalachia. During the Civil War, Mother Jarvis, as she was known, also organized women's brigades to encourage women to help without regard for which side their men had chosen. After the war, she proposed a Mothers' Friendship Day to promote peace between former Union and Confederate families.
Julia Ward Howe was a famous poet and reformer. Around 1870, Julia Ward Howe called for a "Mother's Day for Peace" dedicated to celebrating peace and the eradication of war. In 1870, Howe brought forth the "Mother's Day Proclamation," which urged women to gather and protest against wars, since mothers of mankind alone bear and know the cost.
Howe's version of Mother's Day was held in Boston and other cities for about 30 years but died out before World War I.
After Ann Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, Anna Jarvis, wished to memorialize her mother's life and took up the cause. Anna tirelessly campaigned for a national day to honor all mothers.
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill designating the second Sunday in May as a legal holiday called "Mother's Day."
Julia Ward Howe's Proclamation was prophetic, relevant, and seemingly timeless.
50 years after Roe v. Wade, it may be overturned
150 years after the Mother's Day Proclamation, and we are in shock at the cruelty and waste of life with the Ukraine invasion and war.
It seems we have so much to still learn….
with love,
Kari
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 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 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 learning after his own time, 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.