Before Mother’s Day became a twenty-five-billion-dollar holiday, it was a lot of other things, and it was a lot more complicated than cards and flowers.
Mother’s Day began as a radical movement led by women seeking social change, public health improvements and peace.
Ann Reeves Jarvis, in 1858, started Mother’s Work clubs. She lived in Eastern Appalachia where poverty was crushing as were all the realities that came when there was poverty. She had 14 children and only 4 survived into their teenage years. One way she dealt with her grief was to help other families who were suffering a similar fate.
Her goal was to combat high infant mortality rates and provide medical care to needy families. These community driven clubs educated women on hygiene, provided nursing care, worked with doctors to obtain clean water supplies and safe sewage disposal.
When the Civil War broke out, the area in which she lived, part of West Virginia today, was deeply divided. Neighbors fought with neighbors, family and friends were divided. From the outset she insisted that soldiers from both the Confederacy and the Union be treated equally.
Mother’s workday clubs remained a neutral presence and provided food, clothing, and care to both Union and Confederate soldiers.
After the war, Jarvis organized Mothers’ Friendship Day to bring together families and soldiers from both sides to help heal regional animosities.
In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, best known as the writer of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, issued an appeal for women to unite. Her appeal to womanhood was a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco Prussian war. The appeal was deeply connected to Howe’s feminist conviction that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.
Her original proclamation reads, in part,
“Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or 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 to 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 vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.”
She goes on to invoke the name of womanhood and humanity to bring about a general congress of women, of all nationalities. It did not come to pass. She did not give up. Rather she sought to establish an annual Mother’s Day for Peace, to be celebrated in June. It didn’t quite catch on.
The inspiration for Mother’s Day, moving toward what we now know, came to Anna Jarvis, Ann Jarvis’ daughter. After teaching a Sunday School lesson. She prayed for a memorial Mother’s Day to honor the service mothers provide to humanity. It was to be a day of tribute to all women, especially mothers, to recognize their service to humanity. Anna sought to fulfill her mother’s dream of establishing an official day to honor mother’s contributions.
By 1911, the holiday was celebrated across the USA, and in 1914 Congress authorized a national holiday dedicated to honoring the mothers’ social impact.
Anna Jarvis fought against the commercialization of Mother’s Day, arguing that the true meaning was focused on gratitude, activism and community. To this day, many view today through the lens of peace, social justice and political action.
Each year Mother’s Day offers a unique opportunity to reflect on and honor the role of mothers and people who nurture us, while remembering the rich and complicated history of our nation.
As Mother’s Day evolved, the text from Proverbs 31 became the siren song for women. I remember every Mother’s Day our pastor would do some harangue on Proverbs 31 and my mother would cry the rest of the day because she was such a failure. It kind of ruined the day.
So Proverbs 31 can come with some baggage. The passage needs some redeeming. Proverbs 31 is intended to show what wisdom looks like in action. The whole book of Proverbs is a wisdom book and Wisdom Literature emphasizes practical ways to live well by observing the world’s design and adhering to divine principles. There is a strong emphasis on fear of the Lord. But it’s not the fear and trembling to which our minds default. A more accurate translation would be “awe.” A wise woman is constantly in awe of what is around her and within her.
And the pronoun used for wisdom is always feminine. Wisdom is always “she.” It’s important to say this text was never intended to be interpreted as a job description for women.
The intended audience is actually men. In Jewish culture it is not women who memorize Proverbs 31, it is the men. And they sing it as a song of praise to the women in their lives. This poem is about Wisdom with boots on the ground.
The only instructive language in the poem is directed at men. “Praise her for all her hands have done.”
The first line of the poem…a virtuous woman who can find? It is better translated as valor. This casts the whole passage in a different light. Valor means great courage, strength of mind and bravery. This fits with most of the women I know and celebrate. And valor is not just about what you do, it’s how you do it. When my sister was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, she said she had read this somewhere and she was appropriating it for that time her life. She said, “If you have to go through hell, act like you own the place.” And she did. You don’t mess with my sister.
As Rachel Held Evans wrote, “If you are a stay-at-home mom, be a stay-at-home mom of valor. If you are a nurse, be a nurse of valor. If you are a CEO, a pastor or a barista at Starbucks, if you are rich or poor, single or married, do it all with valor. That’s what makes a proverbs 31 woman, not creating a life worthy of a Pinterest board.”
Proverbs 31 can be redeemed…it’s a way to celebrate all those daily acts of faithfulness exhibited by women. It is how men celebrate the women in their lives. It’s not our roles that define us, but the integrity and bravery we bring to those roles.
It brings us full circle to the rich history of Mother’s Day, women of valor who did extraordinary things with ordinary resources, women who refused to give up even when all the signs pointed to defeat, women who held themselves and their families together in the face of struggle, women who went through whatever was in front of them and acted like they owned the place. Amen.
The Irreverent Reverend 