Mothers Day Revisited

international | anti-war / imperialism | feature

Saturday May 13, 2006 13:53

by Magdalena from Dun Laoghaire

Mothers Day is a call for women to resist war

A mother with a newborn baby in a Belgrade hospital

This year -- as more and more mothers, in America, Britain, Italy, Spain, Poland as well as Iraq, mourn their fallen sons and daughters, lost to the insanity of organized violence -- Julia Ward Howe's call for women to not allow their men to constantly play at war is back in fashion, part of a growing awareness of the link between patriarchy and war.

Mother's Day weekend is coming – there are anti-capitalist meetings, anti-war meetings and pro-Palestinian demonstrations organised in Dublin this weekend. I thought, however, it would be useful to reprint the 1870 call by American poet and women's leader Julia Ward Howe for the establishment of Mothers Day as a holiday. Particularly as, awareness by even anti-war and left activists is nearly nil that what is now widely viewed as a ‘sentimental tribute to family’ was originally a call for women to wage a general strike to end war.

This year — as more and more mothers, in America, Britain, Italy, Spain, Poland as well as Iraq, mourn their fallen sons and daughters, lost to the insanity of organized violence — Julia Ward Howe's call for women to not allow their men to constantly play at war is back in fashion, part of a growing awareness of the link between patriarchy and war.

Howe's original Mother's Day Proclamation should be the basis for parades, remembrances and other events that try to reclaim the holiday's original spirit in a year when the United States government talks seriously not of avoiding war, but of staying the course on the ones they're already fighting, and, heck, maybe even nuking Iran for good measure.

The radical origins of Mother's Day — as a powerful feminist call against war, penned in the wake of the U.S. Civil War in 1870 — are fully compatible with the universal notion of honouring mothers. Women, even more so now, are the primary sufferers of warfare. In the 20th century, civilian populations bore 90 percent of war's casualties around the world. Mass and indiscriminate attacks, popularised in WWII by the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Allied firebombings in Japan and Germany, and the rape of Nanjing, are only the most spectacular examples of a phenomenon in which women become the bombed, the raped and the famine victims, the refugees, the forgotten statistics in what are invariably the wars of men.

In Iraq, the violence of warfare has also been accompanied by a significant rollback in women's rights under the fundamentalist religious parties that now rule the country. In Afghanistan, the transition from the Taliban to a U.S.-backed thugocracy has done virtually nothing to alleviate the fundamentalist repression of women. In the so-called War on Terror, so far, it is primarily women who have been terrorized. Now, as has been the case throughout history, the suffering of men in war is glorified, and the suffering of women ignored. Howe knew this 136 years ago. Even then, the generals had written our historical memory, in the Civil War and in most popular narratives of the bloody trail of modernizing "Western Civilization."

It's worth remembering that the Civil War, the culmination of a political division that lasted longer and was considered more intractable than today's Palestine/Israel conflict or indefinite "War on Terror," and that killed well over 100 times more people on American soil than the attacks of Sept. 11, was not unanimously lauded at the time. And that women thought they could do something to prevent such bloodshed in the future.

Here is the original, pre-Hallmark, Mother's Day Proclamation, penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870:

Arise, then, women of this day!
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 of 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 of murder 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 bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and 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.

Maybe next year

With thanks to G. Parrish http://www.workingforchange.com

The public domain image used in the process of featurising this article was taken from the Wikipedia commons.

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Comments (8 of 8)

Yugoslavia: Bombing for Human Rights

by R. Isible

Wed May 17, 2006 22:31

Somalia and Yugoslavia were the first outbreak of overweaning US imperialism under the guise of humanitarian intervention. Yugoslavia has been one of the most propagandaised wars in recent history. The success of that propaganda has remained largely unchallenged due to the vitriolic abuse heaped on researchers who have documented that actual effects and pre-calculations of the NATO forces.

Summary: NATO planners _expected_ that ethnic tensions would be exacerbated by their bombing, NATO forces took part in war crimes including the bombing of hospitals and TV stations, the liberal media fabricated and exaggerated stories of Serbian war crimes.

If you're appalled and outraged that I believe the above, then I invite you to read the book briefly reviewed at the link below and then follow it up with Edward Hermann's articles on the subject. I think you'll have to admit that the above summary is mostly fair.

Ref article: Mothers Day Revisited 13.5.06 submitted by Magdalena from Dun Laoghaire

by Fiona O'Brien - People Against War Network

Wed May 17, 2006 16:17

nowar at eircom dot net

Indymedia re Mothers Day Revisited 13.5.06

Reference article 'Mothers Day Revisited' posted to www.indymedia.ie on May
13th 2006 and photograph of "A mother with a newborn baby in a Belgrade
hospital". (The new mother has been injured by the 1999 NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia in the service of multi national take over of The Balkans. Click on to
International Action Center article below -

In the first 30 days of attacks on Yugoslavia in 1999 NATO destroyed 25 bridges,
16 major railway stations, 6 major roads, 7 airports. Tens of thousands of factories,
offices, residential buildings, 55 major industrial complexes, 18 oil refineries and
dumps, 5 major agricultural complexes, 300 HA of forests, 21 hospitals, over 200
schools and colleges, 8 power plants, 23 TV and radio transmitters, 18 monasteries
some dating back to the 13th century. Having left thousands of people dead and
thousands more injured and dying (NATO used weapons of mass destruction such
as depleted uranium ammunition, cluster and napalm bombs). With the destruction
by NATO of peoples' means of income, 500,000 people were left jobless and 2 million
left without any income. Having destroyed Yugoslavia's vital services plants factories
etc, Western corporations immediately began to compete for reconstruction contracts.

For full details and photographic coverage of the 78 days and 78 nights of NATO
aerial bombardments of towns and cities across Yugoslavia in 1999, details of NATO
aerial bombardments of Serbian communities in Bosnia in 1995, details of
Croatian/NATO genocide and ethnic cleansing of Serb, Muslim and Roma people in
Krajina in 1995 and for details of the vast mineral wealth and cheap labour sources in the
Balkans please contact nowar@eircom.net.
WE WERE LIED TO ABOUT YUGOSLAVIA AS WE WERE LIED TO ABOUT
IRAQ ...
For an alternative view to the propaganda used by the USA and its puppet states to rally
world public support and as "justification" for military attacks, military occupation
and Western corporate take over of Yugoslavia and Iraq please contact nowar@eircom.net.

Lest we forget - On 6th April 1941, German Nazi war planes bombed Belgrade with
massive loss to civilian life and property. Easter 1943 American war planes bombed
Belgrade supposedly to destroy German military barracks. THEIR FIRST DIRECT HIT
WAS THE MATERNITY HOSPITAL WITH A RED CROSS ON ITS ROOF. Thousands
of people died in the US raids with total destruction to civilian vital services plants.
ALL GERMAN NAXI ARMY BARRACKS WERE LEFT STANDING UNTOUCHED
the the US bombers.
LINK: Read - " U.S. AND NATO GOALS IN THE BALKANS" by Lenora Foerstel
of the US based International Action Center -
http://www.iacenter.org/warcrime/lfoerstl.htm

How many of you know that Bill Clinton

by Ireland Palestine Solidarity

Sat May 13, 2006 19:51

killed over 5000 civilians in Belgrade in his unbalanced massacre against Serbia. How soon we forget.

Add to that

by Shipsea

Sat May 13, 2006 19:36

Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto and quite a few others too. Mary Harney is a beauty, is she not? God forbid she ever...
The idea that women will make the world a gentler, safer place is really an inverted form of sexism, in any case. We are angry, violent and greedy to the same extent as any man - even if those qualities manifest themselves differently. In the absence of access to power and property, we find other ways of expressing our human failings. We've leanred to do it on the sly in many ways. But we shouldnt be judged more or less harshly for that. The notion of women as essentially gentle acts negatively on us in any case: we are seen as freakish or 'bad' when we are understandably angry/assertive. Women are far more likely to be imprisoned - even for minor offences and once there, less likely to be released early. And when a women does something really bad - like Myra Hindley - well contrast and compare the treatment she got during the rest of her life. It may be that everyone deserves that treatment for committing such appalling crimes. However, in the same period of time, a lot of men were convicted of similar and worse crimes with a fraction of the public interest.

Conversely, some women fall back on the 'I need protecting role' in order to evade responsibility for themselves or the things they are doing. We are unlikely to be the saviours of the world on our own any more than men are. But by relegating the worth and role of 'the feminine', societies everywhere have suffered

Dubious link between men and war

Sat May 13, 2006 18:50

Men get to be the war-makers simply because they have unfairly accrued positions of power. If this were a matriarchy then it'd be women murdering over resources. Reducing global conflict as a result of capitalism to a gender issue is trite and distracts from the central problem. Give my regards to Condoleeza Rice, Margaret Thatcher etc.

women and "their" men

by x

Sat May 13, 2006 14:03

I dont like the concept of women owning men (or vice versa), that word "their" seems to imply some measure of total control or ownership by one gender over another. Many men (and women) get involved in wars and/or liberation struggles through their own choice, even together as partners.

Mother's Day

by Anthony

Fri May 12, 2006 17:01

Readers may be confused because they didn't hear Mother's Day being advertised all over the past few days by commercial interests and they may remember having bought a Mother's Day card and presents only a few weeks ago.

That would have been on March 26. The fourth Sunday of Lent was originally a church feast day when people returned to their "mother church" and it had nothing to do with motherhood at all (at all). Only more recently, it became an occasion when domestic servants were allowed to take the day off to visit their mother and eventually becoming the equivalent of America's Mother's Day on this side of the Atlantic.

Reframing Mother's day

by Mary

Fri May 12, 2006 14:19

I liked this article, and think the call for an international womens congress is as relevant today as it was then - well done.

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Mothers Day Revisited

Comments (8 of 8)