Honoring Mothers Everywhere
May 14, 2006
Let me start by saying that for a man to preach on Mother’s Day is a humbling experience. Sure, every one of us has had a mother, but the power of giving birth always stirs men with a blend of profound awe and envy. I mean, I can do most anything a woman can do but this: bearing a child, bringing new life into the world, holding offspring to my breast as it feeds from the life that flows within me. No, I’ve never done that and never will as a man.
Mother’s Day is a time to honor the value of the personal–women’s eminent and early place in the birthing and nurturance of children, and Mothers Day is also a time to honor the value of the political–the larger, public roles women represent in the furtherance of our culture.
On Mother’s Day, it’s not sufficient to send Hallmark cards and chocolates or simply occasion a lovely dinner, as celebrative and fitting as those gestures are. We’d also do well to write letters to our own mothers and other women who’ve never been mothers…thanking them for their sacrificial and oft-unsung efforts in making our world a more just and peaceful household for all living things.
As the line goes, “A woman’s place is in the House and in the Senate…” Is that ever the case as our country weathers a constant backlash against issues of gender equality, reproductive rights, and aid for families with dependent children?
Today I start with the story of Julia Ward Howe, American feminist and card-carrying Unitarian. Howe was a mother of six children and prominent public figure who established the first recognition of Mother’s Day in 1870 as an international peace tribute. If any woman in American history qualifies for celebration on both personal and public counts, it would probably be Julia Ward Howe.
She was an abolitionist, suffragist, lay preacher and associate of Charles Sumner, Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Howe was an extraordinary 19th century woman, who possessed the rare combination of Victorian high-mindedness and radical outspokenness.
She was born on May 27, 1819 in New York City. Howe was raised in a Calvinist Episcopalian home in part by her father and in part by her mother’s sister, her mother having died when she was five. Julia was an attractive and bright young girl, participating in an active social circle through the influences of her aunt and brother. At an early age, Howe was writing scholarly pieces which were published by the New York Review and the Theological Review.
Julia’s bond with her father was affectionate yet restrictive. For example, he approved of her accomplishments in both music and languages, since he had no hesitation about hiring the best teachers for her. But he surely wished that his eldest daughter would take more of an interest in household matters. This familial judgmentalism would haunt Julia throughout her life and was repeated by her husband when she got married. Indeed, she wed a man who greatly resembled her father.
While visiting Boston in 1841, Julia met the head of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, a social leader of great stature in New England, Samuel Gridley Howe, known as Chev. Two years later in 1843, they were married. Julia was 23 and Chev was 42.
From Chev Howe’s point of view, for an unmarried woman to be independent was one thing, but it was quite another for his own wife to be in the public eye. Julia’s husband was involved in many reform movements: prison, education, and eventually anti-slavery. But Julia was unable to join in her husband’s work, because he was fanatically opposed to married women in public life.
As early as 1850 she spent a year in Rome with two of the children. Divorce was contemplated several times. Her first literary work, Passion Flowers, was a collection of poems, some of them written that year in Rome, published anonymously in 1854. Three years later, while her husband was away in Kansas, her first play, Leonora, was produced. It was condemned as scandalous and immoral and closed in one week. Chev was outraged.
Julia began to turn inward to study languages, religion and philosophy. Although the couple shared the same house, they remained in physical and spiritual alienation until the time of his death in 1876. Looking back on her years of marriage she would write in her journal: “I have never known my husband to approve any act of mine which I myself valued.”
She was not without friends. She attended Theodore Parker’s sermons, and he both admired and encouraged her. She had by now become a Unitarian. She continued to write poems and plays full of tales of passionate love, betrayal and death and filled with veiled references to her unhappy marriage.
Julia was past 40 and for the most part her life seemed fairly set, when in February of 1862 the Atlantic Monthly published her poem “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The words were set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” and it swept the North. Suddenly Howe was a minor celebrity, and the course of her life was changed.
Julia grew increasingly involved in women’s work, because it helped to relieve some of the feelings of unworthiness her upbringing and husband had instilled in her. She wrote: “One of the comforts I found in the new association was the relief it afforded me from a sense of isolation and eccentricity.”
In 1870 Julia Ward Howe helped found and become editor of the weekly “Women’s Journal” She also edited a book defending coeducation. Along with other prominent Unitarian and Universalist women, she was involved in the formation of the Association for the Advancement of Women and in 1881 was elected its president.
Julia Ward Howe was active in our denomination as well. She preached often in Unitarian and Universalist pulpits. She brought women ministers from around Boston to her home and this led to the formation of the Women’s Ministerial Conference.
What a productive, fulfilling career she embodied, especially after her husband died. She once asked Senator Charles Sumner to come to the aid of a needy citizen. When Sumner turned her down with the excuse that he had grown too busy to concern himself with individuals. Howe replied, “Charles, that’s remarkable. Even God hasn’t reached that stage yet.”
Yet the effort that became her main cause was the promotion of world peace. Howe grew increasingly convinced that the Franco-Prussian war was unnecessary and barbaric. In her reminiscences she wrote: “Why do not the mothers of humankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?”
Julia plunged into a fury of activity, writing letters, speaking, organizing meetings, traveling all over the East Coast and eventually even to England to promote her cause. She wrote a manifesto against the Franco-Prussian War, and had it translated into five languages, planning to deliver it at international peace conferences in London and Paris.
However, because she was a woman, the European organizers denied her a place on the program. Angry but undaunted, Howe hired her own hall, and posted broadsides inviting the public to hear her. Few came. She then returned to the United States, not broken but inspired with a new idea. She called it Mother’s Day.
For several years, on June second in New York, Boston and Philadelphia as well as abroad, Mother’s Day was celebrated in the spirit of peace-making. Unfortunately, Howe’s Mother’s Day faded into obscurity and was replaced by the highly commercialized and sentimentalized version we now know in this country.
Yet in recent times small pockets of women and men have reclaimed the day as a day for women’s resistance, social action, protest and organizing. In 1980 for example, women in Peru chose Mother’s Day as a day to protest against all the forces that keep women powerless. They spoke out on the need for health care and child care, freedom from government repression and freedom from violent spouses. They noted that it was tragic that the very women who are given flowers, poems and gifts on this day often endure the rest of the year in self-denial and sacrifices, struggling again hunger, violenc, and unemployment.
There’ve been other examples as well of Mother’s Day celebrations in the spirit of the original founder, Julia Ward Howe. Surely, the ways in which we can be private and public advocates for the welfare of women and children are countless. You may not choose to lead the kind of public life that Julia Ward Howe did, but all she’s urging on Mother’s Day, indeed every day, is for women who happen to be biological mothers to do everything possible to insure the safety and well-being of their own offspring, but not to stop there…to be relentless advocates for children living on the margins, children abused…for the personal and the political are indeed joined in the full religious life.
I think of my own Mother who was one to follow the advice of Thomas Jefferson in parenting: “In matters of taste, be flexible; in matters of principle, stand firm.” You see, Mom wasn’t picky about any habit of mine whether it had to do with eating, clothes, or hobbies. On the other hand, she stood unyielding on concerns of friendship, moral integrity, and social justice. Her life banked on such principles, and she wanted her two sons to follow suit.
Mom knew that true servant leaders work from a deep place of integrity in themselves, from their very hearts. As the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker said: “If it ain’t in your heart, it ain’t in your horn!” Mary Towle understood Parker’s words, tried to live them.
During Mom’s college days at the University of Colorado, when one of her sorority sisters tried to commit suicide, and consequently was “tried behind closed doors” for her purported “misbehavior”, my mom stood tall and said: “sisters, if anyone ought to be voted out of the sorority, it could be any one of the rest of us who’ve failed to sense Maureen’s anguish and come to her support in time of need.” My mother’s outspoken courage carried the day, and years later, Maureen kept returning to reunions, never realizing that her sisters actually tried to boot her out of her beloved sorority. Yes, yes, my Mom always seemed to stand for compassion in crunch-time.
Our mother was an unyielding advocate of engaged spirituality. Mary Towle believed that racism was primarily a white responsibility and that her two boys must battle it in our souls as well as carry our fair-share in its institutional elimination. She knew that we’d be tempted to be enamored with our positive self-image–looking good to the outside world rather than being dedicated to opposing the demon of racism itself.
She urged us to put our bodies on the line, where the trouble is. She told us that being an agent of justice must always transcend being cloyingly polite or politically comfortable. Mom never mentioned Julia Ward Howe, to my recollection, but everything she taught us about right relationship resembled the words and behavior of Howe.
One day Mom was serving as our den mother and the next day driving the blind and visiting the sick. She was a mother who helped me with my homework every night as well as a woman who stood tall on behalf of sexual orientation justice in a Presbyterian Church that turned a deaf ear to her cries. She was a mother who would conscientiously read my sermons yet always dared to render critical comments, hoping to make me a better, more principled preacher.
Mary Flanagan Towle was a mother who was profoundly proud of her son but took me to task whenever she felt my character leaked cowardice. Indeed Mom often said: “Tom, all your sermons and books are nice but not really that consequential in the final analysis. Son, your best moment was when you went to Selma as a shy, scared young adult and fought for racial justice. That’s what I’ll remember most about your being a reverend!”
And so it goes: whenever women, and men as well, show compassion both privately and publicly, we’re following in the footsteps of our courageous and bold Unitarian sister, Julia Ward Howe and other mothers like her. Whenever we do everything in our power to help our children, all children, learn to cultivate peace within their hearts and in their schoolyards, we’re paying homage to Julia Ward Howe, we’re honoring the Mother’s Day she founded.
Whenever we have the guts to pursue what Howe called the “august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities,” then her work becomes our work.
And then we can proudly proclaim Happy Mother’s Day, Julia! Happy Mothers’ Day to all of us!
Tom Owen-Towle
May 14, 2006
