UU Society of Cleveland

May 11,2008

Julia Ward Howe and the Story of Mother's Day

by Rev. Colin Bossen

Call to Worship

Sermon

In the first worship and preaching class I took in seminary I was warned that Mother's Day services are some of the hardest to do. Not everyone has a good relationship with his or her mother and, I was told, blithely celebrating one's childhood or one's mother could lead to trouble.

I have learned that this is true simply by watching my own family. My mother is a wonderful human being who, in my opinion, has been an excellent parent. Much of who I am today, my better qualities at least, come from her. My love of cooking and my sense of humor are both her fault.

Sara, my wife, is also an excellent mother. I am constantly amazed by her patience, her dedication to our children and her ability to multi-task. One of the things I appreciate most about her is the way that she has taught Emma conflict management skills and the value of cooperation. Since the birth of Asa my admiration for Sara as a mother has been strengthened.

On the other hand, my father and his brothers and sister had a difficult relationship with their mother. My grandmother struggled with mental illness throughout much of her life. As a result she was, at times, down right mean to her children when they were growing up. Over the course of her life my Dad and his siblings all had very complicated relationships with my grandmother. Their sense of family duty and loyalty is strong and they did their best to take care of her. At the same time they had a lot of lingering resentment towards her. They could get very upset with her over what I think of as fairly trivial matters.

Watching my father has taught me that no matter what you think of your mother she is still your mother. Your mother is one of the two people responsible for your existence. Even if you were adopted, or had a step-mother, your nonbiological mom had an important role in who you became as an adult. Hard as these facts may be to face for some people there is a not a lot that can be done about them.

I imagine that Mother's Day is very hard for those who did not know their mothers. While I have been blessed to come from a complete family I have known a few people whose mothers died when they were young. Talking to them it seemed like there was a hole in their lives.

The urge to celebrate motherhood is something that appears to be basic to human culture. Some of the oldest known human artifacts are statuettes of pregnant women. Two of these, the goddess figurines the Venus of Berekhat Ram and the Venus of Tan Tan, are at least two hundred thousand years old and predate the emergence of modern humans. There is some controversy over whether these two figurines were made by people or by natural geological processes. However, the sheer number and age of similar figurines indicates that motherhood has been something that we humans have held as sacred for a long time. It may have even been the first thing we held as sacred.

Mother's Day is a celebration of mothers and fertility. There are a lot of cultures that have holidays to honor these things. In ancient Greece they celebrated the goddess Rhea, mother of the Gods. In Rome there was a three-day festival to honor Cybele and in the British Isles and parts of Europe there were holidays honoring the goddess Brigid. In addition, most polytheistic societies have had some sort of goddess who is associated with fertility and motherhood. In the Hindu tradition there is Shakti and in ancient Sumer there was Ishtar.

The Mother's Day we are celebrating today does not have a concrete link to these older cultures. In fact, it only dates back to the late nineteenth century. It has its' origins in the United States with two women: Julia Ward Howe and Anna Jarvis. Some of you may have heard of Ward Howe before. She is a Unitarian most famous for writing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" for the Union Army during the Civil War. She was the one who, more-or-less, came up with the idea of the modern Mother's Day. After Ward Howe's death Jarvis was one who really popularized it.

Julia Ward Howe was a polymath. She was a poet, a literary critic, a philosopher, a suffragist and an abolitionist. She came from an upper class New England family and was educated from an early age in French, Italian, German, Latin and Greek. By the time Julia was twenty she had published her work in the Literary and Theological Review and the New York Review.

Even as she was embarking on what she hoped to be a literary career she was leading a lively social life. She was one of the people at the center of New York City's social scene in the early 1840s and after the death of her father she was left with a large inheritance. This made her a very desirable match and many young men pursued her. In 1843, at the age of 23, Julia married the physician Samuel Gridley Howe.

When they met Samuel Howe was the director of the New England Institute for the Blind, later the Perkins School for the Blind, a pioneering school for people with disabilities. He had recently returned from abroad where he fought in the Greek revolution against the Turks. He cut the figure of a dashing and brilliant military hero.

Samuel Howe was eighteen years Julia's senior. Despite his progressive politics, he had no desire to foster his wife's literary ambitions. For the first several years of their marriage Samuel discouraged his wife from publishing her work and speaking in public. This was somewhat ironic since Samuel did not object to single women engaging in these activities. He had encouraged Florence Nightingale to become a nurse and counted several well known women among his friends. It seems that he objected to his wife engaging in a public life rather than the idea that women could engage in public life.

Primarily as a result of the tension over their views of Julia's literary career, the Howes marriage was troubled. Soon after they were married Julia stopped publishing her work.

During the early years of their marriage Julia traveled widely with husband and befriended many of the leading literary and cultural lights of her era. While on a year long honeymoon to Europe she met the leading Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. Parker christened their first child, Julia Romana, and despite their marital difficult the couple had five more children together.

Throughout their marriage Samuel was a well known activist for social reform and justice. When he had married Julia he had been an opponent of slavery but had also disapproved of the militant techniques and emotional arguments of the abolitionists. As the 1840s turned to the 1850s and the tension between the advocates and opponents of slavery heated-up Samuel became more and more militant. By 1857 he was part of the Secret Six, a group of leading Bostonians who came together to furnish the radical abolitionist John Brown with the money and guns necessary for armed opposition to slavery.

At the same time Julia was engaged in social justice work of her own. She worked alongside her husband in the anti-slavery cause and in later years became one of the pioneers of the women’s rights movement in this country. Later in life, in the 1870s, she became one of the first people to advocate for the possibility of women serving as Unitarian ministers. In addition to being an advocate for both equal rights for women and racial justice Julia was a respected writer and poet. She was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and her writings often focused on political topics. One of her most famous poems is “The Death of the Slave Lewis.” Written in 1854 it captures her feelings as New England abolitionist about the institution slavery. After describing the gruesome murder of a slave who has been beaten to death she writes:

It is no murder, when the unsanctioned force,
Wastes a poor negro’s life beneath the thong
In your brave South. Where freer law has course,
A man who toys too rudely with his horse
Is held a culprit, and acquits the wrong.

The outrage Julia felt about the dehumanizing institution of slavery led her to support the Union army during the Civil War. Like many progressives and abolitionists of her era, the Civil War was a sort of holy crusade for Julia. In the autumn of 1861 while she and her husband were in Virginia visiting a Union Army camp Julia composed "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." I think one verse from the piece is enough to capture its spirit:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free
While God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! While God is marching on.

The Civil War was a traumatic event. Over its' course there were almost a million casualties, close to three percent of the population at the time. And during the war close to six hundred thousand people were killed. Many people in the United States were disgusted by the violence of the war. Julia was one of them. Though she supported the Union and was a militant abolitionist after the war she converted to an anti-militarist position. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 solidified her new views. She felt that war was a "return to barbarism" and that the reasons for the conflict "might easily have been settled without bloodshed."

In Julia's day men held almost all of the important positions in Western society. Since society, as ruled by men, kept having wars she thought that instead of appealing to men to make peace it was better to appeal to women. Specifically she thought that mothers could be influenced to stop the violence. Since women raised men she thought that they could teach them to be non-violent. In 1870 she issued the original Mother's Day proclamation and urged women to say: "We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." Her Mother's Day was to be a day of peace. It was to be a day where women told men to stop fighting and learn to treat each other as dignified human beings.

Julia's intention was that Mother's Day would spark an international movement. She traveled to Europe to try and get support for her idea from people outside of the United States. Unfortunately she was only able to get a few, primarily New England, cities to celebrate the day. It never really caught on. Within thirty years it had fizzled completely. Julia's Mother's Day was celebrated on June second.

The Mother's Day we celebrate today is largely the responsibility of another woman, Anna Jarvis. Jarvis started working on popularizing Mother's Day in 1905 and by 1914 she was able to convince Congress and President Wilson to pass a law declaring the second Sunday in May to be Mother's Day. Jarvis wanted Mother's Day to be a day to honor mothers and motherhood. She objected to the commercialization it underwent almost as soon as it became an official holiday. She wrote "I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit." She frequently, and publicly, sparred with the Florist's Exchange, the floral industry lobby of its' day. In one of life's great ironies when Jarvis was old and penniless her nursing home expenses were paid, unbeknownst to her, by the Floral Exchange.

Mother's Day today is celebrated in about forty countries. Until recently Julia Ward Howe's intention that the holiday be a day for peace had largely been forgotten. For many today Mother's Day is only a holiday to honor mother's and motherhood. However, since the outbreak of the Iraq war a number of groups have been trying to use it to work for peace. Two years ago Code Pink gathered on Mother’s Day in Washington, DC with military mothers to urge President Bush to bring the troops home. Last year the group Brave New Foundation worked with No More Victims to produce a video about the history of Mother’s Day to raise money for Iraqi children maimed in the war. This year there has been an effort by a group of Unitarian Universalists peace activists to reclaim the original spirit of Mother's Day with the formation of a group called Julia's Voice. Julia's Voice describes itself as Mom's for Peace. And here in Cleveland there is going to be a Mother's Day Peace Party. Despite these events, for many of us Mother's Day remains simply a day to think about the mothers in our lives. I hope that whether you view Mother’s Day as a day for peace, as a day to celebrate mothers or both you have a good one.

Amen and Blessed Be.

Benediction

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