One last night-time read✨, from Heather Cox Richardson…. (Patreon)

Good evening my loves.

As I turn in after hunting for a vague surprise, after a long a beautiful day (pancakes in the morning with the kiddo and his sleepover friends, a beautiful beautiful Graveside Variety gig with Elizabeth Lesser, which we will share with you soon, and a land blessing for some lovely pals who just bought a couple acres in the woods…) I wanted to close out the day with something I read that resonated deeply.

Not only did it resonate with me, but I popped onto socials and saw that Ani Difranco had shared it as well. I’m gonna cut and paste most of it here and then link the rest so you, like good citizens, can read it at the source and subscribe.

I also just read all of your comments from earlier today and am thinking deeply about all of your wounds, losses, complicated mothers and layers and layers and layers of joy and pain.

It felt right to close out this sweet ass day on a high note and say night night and give you a mom kiss.

We all need it.

So; this is a post from Heather Cox Richardson, whose Substack, “Letters from an American”, I started following when I was first locked down in New Zealand, at the recommendation of my Kiwi landlord, Nick of the ride ‘em mower.

I’ve been a loyal reader ever since. It’s a deep daily dive into politics against the landscape of deeper American History, and it’s a constantly epic, insightful and very-necessary-feeling pamphlet of our time. We have to constantly keep history alive in order to understand this mess we are in, and Heather (a former mainstream journalist), does it with more grace than any other writer working out there.

So here was her Mother’s Day post, and if you wanna read the whole thing (this is about half of it), click for the rest, and for the love of Christ, subscribe to her substack, as a paying member if you can. You’re patrons. You know how it works.

…..

If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia Ward Howe that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change society.

The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of heroism discovered that newly invented long-range weapons turned death into tortured anonymity. Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, or withered into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives away.

The women who had watched their hale and healthy men march off to war were haunted by its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers. The men who did come home were scarred in both body and mind.

Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.

But out of the war also came a new sense of empowerment. Women had bought bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed farms, harvested fields, worked in war industries, reared children, and nursed soldiers. When the war ended, they had every expectation that they would continue to be considered valuable participants in national affairs, and had every intention of continuing to take part in them.

But the Fourteenth Amendment, which established that Black men were citizens, did not explicitly include women in that right. Worse, it introduced the word “male” into the Constitution when it warned states against preventing “male inhabitants” from voting. In 1869, the year after the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution….

(Continue reading here: https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/may-11-2024?r=17pp4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email)

💐

Enjoy. Go follow Heather.

Good night my loves.

Sleep sweetly.

X

A