What Mother’s Day is Really About

Today as I was surfing the net I stumbled across this site: www.takebacktheday.ca.

The website is about what Mother’s Day began as. Somewhat surprisingly it was not invented by Hallmark. It was, in fact, Mothers Day, the realization of a dream of a woman named Anna Jarvis. She and her mother both worked for peace and were social activists.

The inspiration for a national Mother’s Day came from a West Virginian woman and mother of eleven who suffered through the loss of eight of her children. In 1858 at only 26, Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis organized women in her area into Mothers Day Work Clubs to improve the health and sanitation conditions in her county. During the American Civil War, she was adamant her clubs stay neutral, and they courageously nursed soldiers from both sides. When the war ended, she arranged the first Mothers Friendship Day in 1868 to reconcile friends and families torn apart by the bitter conflict, and the holiday was celebrated on several occasions after.

One writer, Julie Ward Howe, wrote a Mothers’ Day Proclamation in 1870. It called on mothers around the world to work for peace:

Arise then… women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts!
***
And up from the bosom of a devastated Earth
A voice goes up with our own.
It says “Disarm! Disarm!”

Mothers’ Day was recognized as a national US holiday in 1914. Canada, Mexico and 48 states had been celebrating it since 1909. Shortly after becoming a national holiday the apostrophe was moved and it became Mother’s Day, a celebration of individual mothers. Individual mothers who needed flowers, and cards, and jewelry, and as many other gifts as one could think of.

According to the National Retail Federation Mother’s Day is a $15 billion industry in the US alone.

Perhaps it is time for us to take back this day. To put that apostrophe back where it belongs and instead of buying something for our mothers make something, or donate to somewhere, or volunteer. 

We can take back this day from Hallmark and work for peace.

Paragraph 175

I recently watched a movie called Paragraph 175. It is a documentary about the Nazis’ treatment of homosexuals in the holocaust. Everyone knows about the 6 million Jews who were murdered during the holocaust. Not many know about the 10-15000 gay men who were sent to concentration camps. Fewer than 10 of those men were still alive at the time of this movie.

Oddly enough there are only 5 cases of lesbians in concentration camps. This was because to the Nazis saw lesbianism as temporary and curable and that lesbians could still procreate for the Aryan cause. Basically it was easy to force procreative sex on lesbians.

Gay men mostly escaped the gas chambers because they were gay Christians. But they were the lowest of the low in the hierarchy of the concentration camps. They were marked with the Pink Triangle.

Here’s an excerpt from The Pink Triangle.com:

“Triangles of various colors were used to identify each category of “undesirable”: yellow for Jews, brown of Gypsies, red for political prisoners, green for criminals, black for anti-socials, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, blue for immigrants, and pink for homosexuals.

The pink triangles were slightly larger than the other colored triangles so that guards could identify them from a distance. It is said that those who wore the pink triangles were singled out by the guards to receive the harshest treatment, and when the guards were finished with them, some of the other inmates would harm them as well.”

When the Nazi regime fell almost all others were released homosexuals were branded criminals and sent to prison. East Germany’s version of Paragraph 175 lasted until 1968. West Germany kept the Nazi version of the law until 1969.

If you wish to hear some very moving stories about the experiences of homosexuals during the Nazi Regime Paragraph 175 is an amazing movie.

That’s All Well and Good … But What About the Rest of Us?

So that last post is an example of the generally excepted history of the vote for women. What I didn’t acknowledge was that the Dominion Elections Act only allowed white women to vote.

In fact many of the suffragettes were upper class, white women who felt that their morals would help to uphold the country.

So being my white self I assumed (wrongly) that I should go and find out when the African Canadians got the vote. So I went searching and searching and searching. And I didn’t find anything. But I did find out about Indo-Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians as well as some certain European Canadians.

But wait? you say. Is this really feminist? In my opinion, and in the opinion of other feminists (though not all), yes. Race is intertwined with gender.

So here is a history of enfranchisement in Canada.

1900 – The Dominion Elections Act sets rules for voting. It sets it up so that the requirements to vote federally are the same as the provincial requirements. This bars minorities from voting. This included visible minorities, women and aboriginals.

1917 – The War Time Elections Act opened up the vote to some women, mostly those who had relatives fighting the Great War. Unfortunately this act also took away vote rights from “enemy aliens” naturalized after 1902. This include German Canadians and Ukcranian Canadians.

1920 – The Dominion Elections Act is amended to include “all Canadians over 21″. This does not include Aboriginals or anyone else that is excluded from provincial elections. This means that Asians and Hindus (what they called Indo-Canadians back in the day).

1938 – The Dominion Elections Act is revised but still retains the portion that those barred from voting provincially are barred federally as well as that Aboriginals are barred from voting.

1947 – In BC an act allows ”every” Canadian to vote except Japanese and Aboriginal peoples. It also stripped Doukhobors, Hutterites, and Mennonites of their right to vote unless they had served in the armed forces.

1948 -  Part of the Dominion Elections Act is repealed and Japanese Canadians are finally allowed to vote.

1955 – The Federal government allows the Doukhobors to vote. As of 1955 only Aboriginals were still barred from voting.

1960 – Aboriginals are allowed to vote without having to give up their treaty or renounce their status.

The CBC has some very interesting videos documenting enfranchisement in Canada (Click here).

Even now that I have included this time line of when minorities got to vote I still feel like that it really doesn’t cover the whole big idea. Just because these people are now allowed to vote does not mean that discrimination against them stopped. It wasn’t even stopped after Canada tried to become a multicultural society.  In fact multiculturalism has its own problems.

Just because we have a view of ourselves as accepting does not mean we have always been so, nor are we always that way now.