I love dismissing holidays that I think are just a big bag of shite. One of my favourite tricks used to involve telling my friends that St. Valentine was an anti-semite, right at the point they were gearing up to get all flowered/chocolated/majorly ripped off at candlelit dinner time. (Perverse I know, but amid all my worthy, caring, humanist qualities there is a palapable strain of - non-polymorphus - perversity. Forgive me, dear reader, for all those occasions ahead where it is bound to rear its fugly head .)
Now, where was I? asked the Tangetessa. Ah, yes, craptastic pre-printed dates for the diary. There are many. Do you know what's NOT one though? I'll give you a clue. It falls today in my native Australia (is native ok in that sense or have I just trashed post-colonial thinking in one fell swoop? Is one fell swoop ok?) and I think, the US.
Mother's Day.
And not just because I love, adore and venerate my mother, which I do, but because it didn't originate in a cauldron of commercialism via Disney and Coke (and origins are sooooo important to me as my marvellous Mr Plog is finding out. So far, so verboten: veil, white, the list goes on). Although a modern holiday (not to be confused with British Mothering Sunday, now also, confusingly, called Mother's Day, which dates to the 16th century), there was an earlier attempt to set this date by Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), writer of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". She was so moved by the horrors of war that in 1870 she took it upon herself to rally women together, across national lines, to oppose war. Her Mother's Day declaration follows:
Arise then ... women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will 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, the 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 a 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 our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough 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 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 someplace deemed most convenient
And 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.
Tragically so timeless. We're so progressive, aren't we, that in the past 140 years we've reached the moon yet we can't halt this man-made (yep, I went there!) phenomenon. It's not to say that women in power would be all sugar and spice ("Hi! Have you met my friends Margaret and Golda?") but, um, it's worth trying, no?
This morning in London, where it is not Mother's Day, I happen to be going to a session on transnational feminism, part of a seminar organised by European Alternatives. It is described in the programme with the following:
Feminism has become increasingly recognised as a legitimate concern at the international level. At the same time, equality itself remains decidedly allusive in many sectors of life, sex trafficking and female abuse are still prevalent even in ‘Western’ states. What remains of the feminist project of the 60s and 70s, what are the implications of ‘postcolonial’ critiques of feminism, and what possibilities are there for a radical transnational and cosmopolitan feminism to arise?
Thinking about Julia Ward Howe on this day, thinking about all the mothers who have buried their children for a load of piss masking itself as ideology, I think the feminist project needs to be a lot broader. Let's stop war, sistahs! Let's gather together all the good men we know who aren't reflected in the dark halls of power, let's re-educate all those misguided menz and womenz who think gun play and nukular weapons are ok and let's make next Mother's Day and all the Mother's Days thereafter safer, happier, freer and better.
And may all of you mums have a great one this year. Shout out especially to mine and all the cool new ones, of all steps and shapes. I know it's not easy, you guys, but you're all amazing! xxx
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