Women's Space

by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, written Mother’s Day, 2006

The women responsible for the holiday we know as Mother’s Day did not celebrate the day as it is celebrated in the United States. The day as they envisioned and conceived it had nothing to do with telephone calls from children, flowers, candy, or dinners out. It had nothing to do with the mothers and grandmothers with the most children and grandchildren being recognized with carnations and ribbons during church meetings. It wasn’t about Hallmark cards or Hallmark moments.

The women most responsible for Mother’s Day were radicals; feminist revolutionaries. Julia Ward Howe, who penned the Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870, was an abolitionist, sharing leadership of the movement with the likes of William Lloyd Garrison, William Cullen Bryant, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was a playwright, a poet and a mother of six who once wrote of her abusive marriage under a pen name when her husband forbade her to publish. She was a peace activist who worked tirelessly for an end to war and for healing the wounds of war which were suffered by civilians and soldiers alike. She was a woman who began to see and understand the parallels between the institution of slavery in the United States and the enslavement of the people of women.

Julia Ward Howe struggled as we struggle today in an oppressive marriage in which her husband threatened that if she divorced him – as she tried to do and wanted to do – he would maintain custody of their youngest two children. Chattel to her husband, as were all wives in the 1800s, Howe’s husband controlled her inheritance, using this power he had over her to withhold the money which would have allowed her freedom and independence to engage in the political work which gave her life meaning.

If we understand the reality of Howe’s life, then what she wrote in her Mother’s Day Proclamation takes on new meaning for us. When Howe writes, “Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause,” she writes not only of the reality of mothers in bondage to their husbands throughout history, she writes of her own very private and personal bondage – and hell — as well.

Mother’s Day was originally Anna Reeves Jarvis’s idea. Jarvis had been a peace activist during the Civil War, devoting herself to healing the wounds and horrors of war for soldiers and their families on both sides. Jarvis called the very first “mother’s days,” “Mothers’ Work Days,” days set aside to improve sanitation during a time when more soldiers in the Civil War were dying from disease and infection than from the wounds of battle.

It was the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s, following on the heels of the devastation of the Civil War, which moved Julia Ward Howe to begin a one-woman international peace crusade inaugurated by her Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870. In 1872 she traveled to Europe hoping to promote an International Women’s Peace Conference, but established peace organizations there would not allow her to speak publicly because she was a woman. She rented her own hall and conducted her own meetings, but her attempts failed. She returned to the U.S. and promoted Mother’s Day as a day as a festival of peace; her initiative was successful and resulted in a June 2 Mother’s Day celebration in major cities which lasted 30 years. It was a day in which mothers and grandmothers united to oppose violence and war, a day in which they demanded that men lay down their weapons and work for a peaceful new world.

Mother’s Day lasted only for a short time in its conception as a day of revolution and resistance. When the elder Ann Jarvis died, her daughter began a campaign to revision Mother’s Day as a holiday honoring the individual sacrifices of mothers for their families. The younger Jarvis’s efforts found favor with Woodrow Wilson’s relentlessly anti-Women’s Suffrage administration, and in 1913, Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May Mother’s Day, without any reference to the reason for which it was envisioned by the elder Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe.

Today Mother’s Day in the U.S. is a billion-dollar industry dedicated to sentimentalizing and romanticizing motherhood as patriarchally envisioned, all the while the governments and religions and conservative ideologues in general wage war on mothers by way of forced motherhood, denying them access to contraceptives and abortion, criminalizing them and penalizing them for such things as breastfeeding in public, for their health problems, disabilities, and impoverishment, for their victimization by abusive partners, and for rejecting the abuses of technobirth in favor of birthing their own way, attended by midwives. Today’s Mother’s Day, instead of being a day of resistance to all forms of violence, war, and tyranny, is a day set aside for the perpetuation and repetition of platitudes, meaningless gestures, and consumerism. It is a mockery of the revolutionary vision and work of the women who conceived it.

Howe is remembered in mainstream history as the writer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but that song was written just as Howe began her public work and before the burgeoning of her own feminist consciousness. Later she would write:

During the first two thirds of my life, I looked to the masculine idea of character as the only true one. I sought its inspiration, and referred my merits and demerits to its judicial verdict. . . . The new domain now made clear to me was that of true womanhood-woman no longer in her ancillary relation to her opposite, man, but in her direct relation to the divine plan and purpose, as a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility. This discovery was like the addition of a new continent to the map of the world, or of a new testament to the old ordinances.

It was in this spirit that Howe penned her Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870. What might our communities, nation, our world, look like, were mothers and grandmothers to re-member our herstory, now dis-membered by male supremacists? What if we were to reject the mockery which has been made of Howe’s proclamation and this day, in favor of returning to revolutionary militance and dedication to the building of a new world, for our children and grandchildren, for all people? What if we seized this day, taking the opportunity it affords us to remind our children, grandchildren, friends, relatives, all who will listen of the vision of the women whose work originally inspired this day.  What if we simply remembered?

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your 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 taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another 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 & 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 Caesars but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of 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.”

A Kiev art museum contains a curious icon from St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai in Israel. It shows two robed Christian saints. Between them is a traditional Roman ‘pronubus’ (a best man), overseeing a wedding. The pronubus is Christ. The married couple are both men.

Is the icon suggesting that a gay “wedding” is being sanctified by Christ himself? The idea seems shocking. But the full answer comes from other early Christian sources about the two men featured in the icon, St. Sergius and St. Bacchus,two Roman soldiers who were Christian martyrs. These two officers in the Roman army incurred the anger of Emperor Maximilian when they were exposed as ‘secret Christians’ by refusing to enter a pagan temple. Both were sent to Syria circa 303 CE where Bacchus is thought to have died while being flogged. Sergius survived torture but was later beheaded. Legend says that Bacchus appeared to the dying Sergius as an angel, telling him to be brave because they would soon be reunited in heaven.

While the pairing of saints, particularly in the early Christian church, was not unusual, the association of these two men was regarded as particularly intimate. Severus, the Patriarch of Antioch (512 – 518 CE) explained that, “we should not separate in speech they [Sergius and Bacchus] who were joined in life“. This is not a case of simple “adelphopoiia.” In the definitive 10th century account of their lives, St. Sergius is openly celebrated as the “sweet companion and lover” of St. Bacchus. Sergius and Bacchus’s close relationship has led many modern scholars to believe they were lovers. But the most compelling evidence for this view is that the oldest text of their martyrology, written in New Testament Greek describes them as “erastai,” or “lovers”. In other words, they were a male homosexual couple. Their orientation and relationship was not only acknowledged, but it was fully accepted and celebrated by the early Christian church, which was far more tolerant than it is today…

Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the “Office of Same-Sex Union” (10th and 11th century), and the “Order for Uniting Two Men” (11th and 12th century).

These church rites had all the symbols of a heterosexual marriage: the whole community gathered in a church, a blessing of the couple before the altar was conducted with their right hands joined, holy vows were exchanged, a priest officiated in the taking of the Eucharist and a wedding feast for the guests was celebrated afterwards. These elements all appear in contemporary illustrations of the holy union of the Byzantine Warrior-Emperor, Basil the First (867-886 CE) and his companion John.

Such same gender Christian sanctified unions also took place in Ireland in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, as the chronicler Gerald of Wales (‘Geraldus Cambrensis’) recorded.

Same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe list in great detail some same gender ceremonies found in ancient church liturgical documents. One Greek 13th century rite, “Order for Solemn Same-Sex Union”, invoked St. Serge and St. Bacchus, and called on God to “vouchsafe unto these, Thy servants [N and N], the grace to love one another and to abide without hate and not be the cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God, and all Thy saints”. The ceremony concludes: “And they shall kiss the Holy Gospel and each other, and it shall be concluded”.

Another 14th century Serbian Slavonic “Office of the Same Sex Union”, uniting two men or two women, had the couple lay their right hands on the Gospel while having a crucifix placed in their left hands. After kissing the Gospel, the couple were then required to kiss each other, after which the priest, having raised up the Eucharist, would give them both communion.

Records of Christian same sex unions have been discovered in such diverse archives as those in the Vatican, in St. Petersburg, in Paris, in Istanbul and in the Sinai, covering a thousand-years from the 8th to the 18th century.

The Dominican missionary and Prior, Jacques Goar (1601-1653), includes such ceremonies in a printed collection of Greek Orthodox prayer books, “Euchologion Sive Rituale Graecorum Complectens Ritus Et Ordines Divinae Liturgiae” (Paris, 1667).

While homosexuality was technically illegal from late Roman times, homophobic writings didn’t appear in Western Europe until the late 14th century. Even then, church-consecrated same sex unions continued to take place.

At St. John Lateran in Rome (traditionally the Pope’s parish church) in 1578, as many as thirteen same-gender couples were joined during a high Mass and with the cooperation of the Vatican clergy, “taking communion together, using the same nuptial Scripture, after which they slept and ate together” according to a contemporary report. Another woman to woman union is recorded in Dalmatia in the 18th century.

Link to article, also see Professor John Boswell Page

Saying he had no discretion under state law, a judge sentenced a Jacksonville, Florida, woman to 20 years in prison Friday for firing a warning shot in an effort to scare off her abusive husband. …

Alexander said she was attempting to flee her husband, Rico Gray, on August 1, 2010, when she picked up a handgun and fired a shot into a wall.

She said her husband had read cell phone text messages that she had written to her ex-husband, got angry and tried to strangle her.

She said she escaped and ran to the garage, intending to drive away. But, she said, she forgot her keys, so she picked up her gun and went back into the house. She said her husband threatened to kill her, so she fired one shot.

“I believe when he threatened to kill me, that’s what he was absolutely going to do,” she said. “That’s what he intended to do. Had I not discharged my weapon at that point, I would not be here.”

Link

And what kind of a guy was Rico Gray, the husband?  He is seven inches taller than Marissa Gray and 100 pounds heavier.  His battering sent Marissa Gray to the hospital. She had a restraining order against him.  He told her if she ever cheated on him, he’d kill her, and that if he couldn’t have her nobody could.  He’s the kind of guy who makes statements like this, under oath, on the record:

‘I got five baby mammas, and I put my hands on every last one of them except for one,” Rico Gray confessed during a November 2010 deposition. “The way I was with women . . . they had to walk on eggshells around me.” He recalled punching women in the face, shoving them, choking them and tossing them out the door.

Link

An interesting article — in which my worlds collide — about a couple who grew up in the Quiverfull movement, married after parent-supervised courtship, then left the Quiverfull community.  The church had delivered Melissa Reyenga’s partner an ultimatum:  stop acting like a woman or leave the church.  So they left the church and Reyenga’s spouse outed herself as a trans woman.

Link

My Quiverfull blog is here.

On Friday, three years after a Collin County jury acquitted the Leshers and their employee of aggravated sexual assault, a Tarrant County jury awarded the couple $13.78 million in a libel judgment. The ruling sends the message that people have the freedom to write what they please online, but they can be held accountable.

The award is the largest ever assessed in an Internet libel case, the Leshers’ attorney, Meagan Hassan, said Tuesday…

“This was clearly a vendetta,” [plaintiffs' attorney] Hassan said. “We originally sued 178 John and Jane Does, and it all came down to two IP addresses.”…

The abuse grew so bad that the Leshers closed their businesses and moved away from Clarksville, where they had lived for more than 20 years, Hassan said. Mark Lesher now practices law in Mount Pleasant and Texarkana, and his wife has given up her salon. Continue reading »

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Now see, this is why we can’t have nice things in mainstream politics. Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon) and Melissa McEwan (Shakesville) were bloggers for the John Edwards presidential campaign back in the day. Conservatives went after the two with a vengeance,ostensibly for having written all the kinds of things about rape, feminism, Roman Catholicism, misogyny, theocratic regimes, that progressive/liberal/feminist political bloggers generally write in the manner in which all of the aforementioned generally write them. Edwards responded publicly that the work of the two bloggers “personally offended” him; nevertheless, he was going to keep them on his staff. They resigned within days.

Since then we’ve learned — and the revelations continue in court today -- that Edwards paid millions of dollars donated to him by a 101-year-old woman in a vain attempt to hide his girlfriend, and the fact that they had a child together. You’ve got him asking a close advisor to say the child was really his, not Edwards’. You’ve got Edwards taking cash from this same 101-year-old woman also, for example, to hide the fact that he was paying $400 a pop for haircuts, even though his popularity as a presidential candidate was centered around his stated concern for economic justice, his pride in his working class roots: John Edwards, working class hero. All the while his wife is dying of breast cancer.

Every woman in this sad saga was lied to, mistreated, exploited, used and ultimately thrown away as so much rubbish.  Well, maybe not Edwards’ daughter, Cate, who remains his staunch supporter.

Mainstream politics, of whatever flavor, really never work for me.  I don’t think they work very often for women, period.   Whatever my suspicions might be, as the stories unfold, things generally turn out to have been much worse than I’d believed they might be.  Whatever my own involvement ends up being, I always have to hold my nose.

by Cheryl Seelhoff, first published in off our back, January 1, 2006.  Image is the work of Eric Drooker.

The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow…

Link at Tennessee Guerilla Women

Dear Jane Alexander,

I just spoke with a young man from your office, who informed me that I had been chosen to be one of twelve recipients of the National Medal for the Arts at a ceremony at the White House in the fall. I told him at once that I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal.

Anyone familiar with my work from the early Sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence–as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright. In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair. Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country.

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art–in my own case the art of poetry–means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A President cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored. I know you have been engaged in a serious and disheartening struggle to save government funding for the arts, against those whose fear and suspicion of art is nakedly repressive. In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. I could not participate in a ritual which would feel so hypocritical to me.

Sincerely,
Adrienne Rich

Link

“Gertrude Beasley’s memoir of growing up dirt poor in and around the Bible Belt town of Abilene, My First Thirty Years, was released in 1925 by Contact Press in Paris. That’s the same press that published James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. H.L. Mencken hailed Beasley’s book as one of the best coming-of-age books ever …

“Despite these accolades, her memoir is largely unknown. Its violent and sexually deviant material caused it to be banned in Britain, where Beasley was living at the time. Most copies were destroyed by Scotland Yard and U.S. Customs. The few that made it to Texas were mostly yanked off shelves by the Texas Rangers, probably on the orders of prominent Texans maligned in her book. Then the author vanished. She was 35. Continue reading »