Mother's Day as a Feminist Killjoy

Growing up in Ottawa, May was an exciting month full of activity. The snow finally melted (or at least stopped falling), the temperatures shot up at least 20 degrees over the course of two weeks and May 2-4 weekend meant the opening of cottages. Overall, it was a pretty good month for a person such as me who loves the warmth of summer. But along with all of these things, there was also the celebration of Mother’s Day.

My mother is a feminist. She is a physician and when she graduated from McGill medical school in the 70s, she was one of only 20 women in her graduating class of 160 – after she graduated, my Nana asked her if she could still be a nurse; families are complicated. My mother grew up Roman Catholic and one of the reasons that she became Anglican was that the Anglican Church began ordaining women. So feminism and faith have always been connected for her, and now for me.

Since Mother’s Day always falls on a Sunday, I have spent part of every Mother’s Day I can remember in Church. In my experience, churches honour Mother’s Day in a number of ways. As a feminist, who is a woman, who has chosen not to have children, who has 4 parents all with unique parenting roles and skills that are not necessarily tied to their gender, I often leave these services frustrated and disappointed. Sometimes churches make the decision to honour all the women who are mothers with prayers or with flowers at the end; a move that is insensitive to step-mothers, adoptive mothers, those who have miscarried or whose children have died and those who are childless not by choice. Sometimes churches celebrate all women on Mother’s Day, whether they are mothers or not, for the ‘mothering they do’; what does that say about our understanding of women’s roles in society? (Oh and incidentally, there is a day for celebrating all women, it is International Women’s Day which is March 8th, this year it was a Sunday; I wonder how many Churches marked it liturgically?) This also begs the question, ‘Why aren’t we celebrating the ‘mothering’ men are doing?” What is that about? If women who don't have children are 'mothering' then why can't men? And then we get to hear all about what ‘mothering’ means. It is usually a journey through the list of feminine behavioural stereotypes, at times with an addendum that admits that now that we have ‘achieved gender equality’ mothers can do anything or everything (but usually we still like it best when they hug us and cook us food). And this is the moment when I roll my eyes so hard I swear it is audible to those around me.

I wonder how many people stop and think about the minefield they are walking into when they throw in a Mother’s Day greeting in Church.

The history of Mother’s Day is in many ways an interesting snapshot of the way our society celebrates and honours women, or doesn't. Mother’s Day in its North American form was founded twice, once by Julia Ward Howe, a social activist who hoped to unite mothers as a force for abolition, pacifism and women’s suffrage. It was later championed by Anna Jarvis, who campaigned to have it established as an official holiday in honour of her own mother. Jarvis became critical of the commercialization of the holiday and spent much of her later years investing in efforts to prevent various industries from profiting from the day because she felt this detracted from the original sentimental meaning of the day. She ultimately ended up in a sanitarium for her efforts and while many others profited from sales of flowers, greeting cards and other consumer goods, she was left with few resources to support herself in her old age, in part due to the fact that she had no children of her own.

We still live in a society that expects and in many cases pressures women to have children and to be their primary caregivers. For centuries in the Church, we have held up the image of the Virgin Mary as the best way to be a faithful woman – one who doesn’t have sex, but does have babies – and women are still judged by these standards. Reproductive justice for women, the right to determine when, how, and whether or not they will become mothers, the support they require to be the best parents possible and the freedom to parent their children without interference, is still limited all over the world. So how does our celebration of Mother’s Day honour those women who are mothers and don’t want to be? Women’s access to reproductive health services, which would ensure their health during maternity and that of their infant children, are also limited such that maternal and infant mortality rates are alarmingly high in many parts of the world. While the maternal mortality rate in Canada is low, for indigenous women it is nearly twice as high as the Canadian average. How do we work that into our celebration of Mother’s Day? In Canada, we still have no national childcare program, despite the solid evidence that it would contribute significantly to the growth of the Canadian economy and in particular would allow women, who do more of the unpaid care work, more career and economic opportunities. Is saying ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ supposed to be an adequate way to honour the incredible amount of unpaid work mothers do in an economic system that is stacked against them? And in a nation that continues to wrestle with the legacy of the residential school system, how do we provide indigenous women, families and communities with the supports they need to parent their children, rather than placing them in foster care at an alarmingly high rate.

I am not raising all of these questions about Mother’s Day because I don’t value the sentiments of thanksgiving and celebration that this holiday represents. Mother’s Day was always important to my Nana. Possibly because as a widowed mother of four in small town Québec in the 1960s and 70s, providing for her children was no easy task, or maybe because she lost two children when they were infants, or possibly because she just didn’t like to celebrate her birthday very much. In any case, it was a holiday that my own Mother always kept for the sake of my Nana and I keep it now for her sake as well. But I will not let Mother’s Day be an occasion for simple, one-sided and uncritical praise of a stereotypical view of motherhood or femininity. My feminist mother wouldn’t stand for it. It should also be an opportunity for us to ask questions about the expectations we place on women around motherhood and how we as a Church have been complicit in creating a stereotype that has limited human flourishing. This is the prayer I offer for Mother's Day this year, in honour of the whole wonderful and trying mess of motherhood.