Mother’s Day for Peace

My mother was not a sentimental woman, so Mother’s Day was not a big deal in our house.  As a family, we probably celebrated Mother’s Day more after she passed away, as a day to visit the place where her ashes were scattered and to remember her, than we ever did when she was alive.

I think my mother objected to the Mother’s Day focus on motherhood as the primary identity for a woman. She  she found that identity limiting and life-denying. She was one of those closet feminists of the 60s and 70s, active in many related organizations like League of Women Voters and Planned Parenthood, reluctantly active in the Methodist Church, and then only to run the food pantry and occasionally to stir up trouble in their version of Adult Forum. Toward the end of her life, she admitted to me that if she had her druthers, she would have joined the Unitarian Church.

So Mother’s Day was a perfunctory holiday in my house, growing up. I think my mother would have been far happier with Mother’s Day if she’d known a bit about the real history of the day. If she had been aware of that history, she would have known a kindred spirit, another strong woman, an icon, a predecessor in women’s rights and justice work. This woman was Julia Ward Howe, the founder of the original Mother’s Day holiday, then called Mother’s Day for Peace.

Julia Ward Howe was born in New York in 1819, to a wealthy banker. She had family in Boston, and through them encountered Unitarianism, reading and hearing and meeting William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller. She married Samuel Howe, who worked as an educator of children with multiple handicaps. She switched from the Episcopal religion of her youth to Unitarianism, attending Theodore Parker’s church, which was the nexus of the radical anti-slavery movement.

She began a career as a writer, and published anonymously, for her work was opposed by her husband. Marriage troubles continued. They disagreed about attending Theodore Parker’s church, which Samuel considered too informal -- he complained that people read newspapers during the service, and some got up and left during the sermon[1] -- so the family instead began to attend Rev. James Freeman Clarke’s Church of the Disciples. Clarke, a Unitarian minister, became a close friend of the Howes.

As our closing hymn, we’ll sing Battle Hymn of the Republic, written by Julia Ward Howe. This hymn was included in the 30’s era Unitarian hymnal “Hymns of the Spirit.” 

This hymn was published in the Atlantic Magazine in 1862, and increased Julia Ward Howe’s prominence as a writer and speaker, so it’s important to this story. She tells about writing this hymn in her autobiography.

We were invited, one day, to attend a review of troops at some distance from the town. My dear minister was in the carriage with me, as were several other friends. To beguile the rather tedious drive, we sang from time to time snatches of the army songs so popular at that time, concluding, I think, with
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground;
His soul is marching on."
The soldiers seemed to like this, and answered back, "Good for you!" Mr. Clarke said, "Mrs. Howe, why do you not write some good words for that stirring tune ?" ...

I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, " I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them." So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper. I had learned to do this when, on previous occasions, attacks of versification had visited me in the night, and I feared to have recourse to a light lest I should wake the baby, who slept near me. I was always obliged to decipher my scrawl before another night should intervene, as it was only legible while the matter was fresh in my mind. At this time, having completed my writing, I returned to bed and fell asleep, saying to myself, "I like this better than most things that I have written."[2]

Her story is just another reminder that the middle of the night is good for more than merely sleeping!

We also heard earlier Julia Ward Howe’s own reflection on her work creating the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Howe, with her husband and many other Unitarians, was involved in the Sanitary Commission, the predecessor to the Red Cross, so they were well acquainted with the horrors of the Civil War. So for Howe to see another war developing in Europe, in countries she had visited and loved, pushed her to agitate in opposition to that war, and to all war. She went to work, writing to prominent women around the world, even traveling to Europe, to promote her peace crusade. She initiated a Mother’s Peace Day observance the second Sunday in June, which was held for a number of years.

This Mother’s Day for Peace died out, but the idea of a Mother’s Day was resurrected by Anna Jarvis in West Virginia in 1907 as a memorial day for women. This gradually spread and became a national holiday in 1914.[3]

After the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe became increasingly involved in the work for women’s suffrage and larger issues of women’s rights. She noted in her autobiography, “During the first two thirds of my life I looked to the masculine ideal of character as the only true one. ... In an unexpected hour a new light came to me, showing me a world of thought and of character quite beyond the limits within which I had hitherto been content to abide. The new domain now made clear to me was that of true womanhood, -- woman no longer in her ancillary relation to her opposite, man, but in her direct relation to the divine plan and purpose, as 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, or of a new testament to the old ordinances.”[4] Howe cofounded the New England Woman’s Club, and was founder or president of several suffrage organizations, and founded a suffrage newspaper, the “Woman’s Journal.”[5] 

As Howe gained greater prominence as a writer, she began to speak publicly, and even preached on occasion, in churches of various denominations when she traveled. She received much encouragement in this work from her minister, James Freeman Clarke.

At a Unitarian denominational meeting in 1875, she organized a gathering of women ministers, which she held at her home church, the Church of the Disciples. This became an ongoing organization, the Women’s Ministerial Conference.[6] Realize that women in the pulpit were a relatively new phenomenon in this era, so these conventions were an innovation.

Howe’s minister, James Freeman Clarke coined a phrase that, good or bad, became a kind of slogan for Unitarianism. This phrase, “the progress of mankind onward and upward forever”, was the last of Clarke’s “Five Points of a New Theology”[7], and it became an epithet for the kind of rosy optimism that our tradition sometimes still struggles with. I don’t want to suggest that progress toward a better world is not possible, but I think most of us would agree that it is not steady and certain,  and that the cost of progress is occasional regress.

Howe did not live to see the fruits of her work for suffrage and women’s rights -- she died a full decade before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed and ratified. In her autobiography, she laments the loss of energy and vitality in the women’s movement as younger women failed to take up the cause, and as she put it, “Death had done his usual work on our number.”[8]

The Mother’s Day for Peace project also faltered, in part because so many potential women supporters became focused on the suffrage movement.

Howe’s relationship with her husband had always been strained, because of his lack of respect for her talents. Toward the end of his life, he softened his attitude toward her work and apologized for his transgressions, and the marriage became more harmonious.

Unfortunately, Howe’s finances, never fully in her control, were mismanaged by her husband until his death and then by a cousin, to the point that she had to go on the lecture circuit to make ends meet.

Howe died in 1910. Her eulogy was given by Samuel Atkins Eliot II, then the president of the American Unitarian Association.[9]  There is a sad irony here. Eliot is now seen as a misogynist, and one consequence of his leadership was that women were driven out of the Unitarian ministry. As one UUA description put it: “Eliot's ... gender discrimination effectively weeded out Unitarian women ministers for the next 50 years.”[10]

I feel a great personal sympathy for Howe’s story, for there are a few parallels in my own mother’s far more ordinary life. My mother was trained as a nurse, but after she married she was discouraged from working outside of the home, in an era when many women found careers and life choices narrowed. She found some outlets in church work and school, but even these were limited. Finances were a source of friction.

I’m sure her story was repeated by many women in her era.  I think my mother could easily have quoted the poet and said,

“ever since I was small like you
I wanted to be myself -- and for a woman that's hard”[11]

I think Julia Ward Howe could have said that too.

I think all of us as woman or as man or claiming both or neither identities, come to realize that progress in our lives is not onward and upward forever. Rather, as Zamora tells us,

Often I lose my way
and my life has been a painful crossing
navigating reefs, in and out of storms,
refusing to listen to the ghostly sirens
who invite me into the past,
neither compass nor binnacle to show me the way.[12]

Can we find solace in this crossing, even as we suffer to be driven from our charted course again and again? Perhaps we can, whether with our own children or with the children of those we love:

go forward, holding to the hope
of some distant port
where you, my children -- I'm sure --
will pull in one day
after I've been lost at sea.[13]

And so may it be --
May each of us abide,
in brief living instantiation,
part of that long line of creation,
mother to child, and father too,
that carries us all,
in fits and starts,
through storms and torments,
gradually, generation by generation,
onward and upward, in hopeful progress, 
toward that long future destination,
that lives only in our dreams.

Notes:
1 Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1899, p. 244.
2 ibid., p. 273-275.
3 http://womenshistory.about.com/od/howejuliaward/a/julia_ward_howe_4_mothers_day.htm
4 Reminiscences, p. 372-373.
5 http://www.juliawardhowe.org/timeline.htm
6 http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/marybillings.html
7 http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/jamesfreemanclarke.html
8 Reminiscences, p. 393.
9 http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Julia_Ward_Howe
10 http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/samuelatkinseliotii.html
11 Daisy Zamora, “Mother's Day”
12 ibid.
13 ibid.