The Radical History of Moms
Posted by Pete on May 1st 2020
With Mother’s Day fast approaching, remember the radical part played by moms in the story of the United States.
Fatherhood has been written into the American story with an energy like no other.
Independence was won, apparently, by Washington, Jefferson, and Adams – 'Founding Fathers'.
And this has set the tone for how the rest of US history is told.
Eleanor Roosevelt holding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The protagonist is always the wise, esteemed father figure.
Lincoln during the Civil War. Roosevelt for WW2. Dr King in the Civil Rights Movement.
But what about mom?
When US history is told as the leadership of dads, motherhood is usually cast in a supporting role.
Martha Washington a shoulder for George to lean on, or Abigail Adams as a confidante for John.
Moms are there in the story, but they’re in the background – the making of American history is left to sturdy fathers and courageous sons.
This is the traditional version of events, and it's done good work to support gender inequality in the US, telling American women that their role is to be mothers and that mothers don’t make history.
But it ain’t true.
Step back and take a more radical view of the American past.
Mothers were always on the frontline of history, winning justice, defending rights, and making a better world.
For a start, the record needs setting straight on Abigail Adams.
She wasn’t just a backstage supporter of her President-husband.
She was an activist while she was First Lady, and for a long time before that, calling for more to be done to enhance women’s rights in the US and condemning slavery.
Eleanor Roosevelt meanwhile took motherly activism in the White House to new heights, defying her husband’s shameful silence on racism in the South to publicly champion the African-American civil rights movement.
But radical US mothers of history are not just from Washington D.C.
Working-class politics in America has always been full of mothers – and they lead from the front.
Mary G. Harris Jones – 'Mother Jones' – was the most famous figure in the US labor movement around the turn of the 20 th century.
After the tragedy of losing her four children to yellow fever in 1867, she became an organizer for the Knights of Labor and an activist in the US socialist movement.
In the struggle for racial justice, too, American mothers have been leading the way for centuries.
Sojourner Truth escaped slavery with her daughter in 1826, spending the rest of the 19th century fighting for abolition and an end the exclusion of black women from the emerging feminist movement.
And Maya Angelou, who had her son, Guy, when she was 17, became the most artistically accomplished figure in the modern struggle for black liberation.
US radical history has also made frequent use of the symbol of motherhood – Emma Goldman named her flagship anarchist journal Mother Earth, for example.
American mothers have never been bystanders to radical history – they’ve made it.
This Mother’s Day, with many of us unable to see our own moms due to the shutdown, let’s show all our love to them – and the radical tradition they represent!