More than
Sugar and Spice ...
An Unusual Mother's Day Sermon
by
The Rev. Dave Weissbard
The Unitarian Universalist Church, Rockford IL
May 10, 1998
[background]
This is Mothers' Day. Days honoring motherhood date back to ancient Greece where tributes to Rhea, the mother of the gods were held during the spring. Mothering Sundays were observed in 17TH Century England when servants were given the 4th Sunday of Lent off to take a mothering cake to their maternal parent.
In 1872, Julia Ward Howe, the Unitarian who wrote the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, proposed the celebration of an annual Mother's Day in the United States and began organizing them in Boston each year as a peace observance.
The real credit for our present celebration is given to Anna Jarvis. Her mother, Anna Marie Reeves Jarvis had tried for several years to get a Mothers' Friendship Day organized to heal the scars of the Civil War. Mrs. Jarvis died in 1905. Her daughter decided to organize a Mother's Day in the Methodist Church in her home town, Grafton West Virginia, on the 2nd or 3rd anniversary of her mother's death. The authorities are divided in dating the first observance as May 10, 1907 or 1908. It must have been 1908 because May 10th was not a Sunday in 1907. She sent a telegram to be read at the service which defined the purpose of the day as:
To revive the dormant filial love and gratitude we owe to those who gave us birth. To be a home tie for the absent. To obliterate family estrangement. To create a bond of brotherhood through the wearing of a floral badge. (She had sent 500 white carnations for the occasion.) To make us better children by getting us closer to the hearts of our good mothers. To brighten the lives of good mothers,. To have them know we appreciate them, though we do not show it as often as we ought. . .
She campaigned to spread the observance. It was Proclaimed by the Governor of West Virginia in 1910. A year later, almost every governor followed suite. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday in May to be a national Mothers' Day.
[second thoughts]
Interestingly, by 1923, Ms. Jarvis, who never married or became a mother herself, filed suit to stop the observance which she felt hadalready become a matter of profit-making instead of sentiment. Just before she died in 1948, at the age of 84, Ms. Jarvis told a reporter she was sorry she had ever started the whole thing.
Today Mothers Day is celebrated around the world - by some countries on the second Sunday in May, some on May 11th, some at different times. In 1992, Americans spent $148 million on Mothers' Day cards alone - not to mention the flowers, chocolates, and restaurant meals.
But think of poor Ms. Jarvis, who spent a fortune over the years to try to undo the mischief she had caused with the best of intentions.
["new perspectives"]
For this morning's FUSION, I pointed to our Unitarian and Universalist history in Rockford, including the fascinating judgement of my predecessor, Dr. Kerr, who, the newspaper observed, "was a worshiper of facts. A new fact in the scientific world makes him glow with enthusiasm."
A teacher of preaching at Meadville/Lombard Theological School, several years ago, when discussing my sermons with a class, suggested that there was a pattern of my taking delight in getting this congregation to look at some things you thought you knew in a different light. I would suggest that I "glow with enthusiasm" from new sociological insights.
[another view of some mothers]
I want to share a new perspective with you on this Mother's Day. My theme was telegraphed this week by Stephen Bochko to those of you who watch NYPD Blue. The plot this week, based loosely on a real life case, dealt with a mother who claimed that her missing child had been bludgeoned to death by her boyfriend, but it was discovered that it was she and not he who had done the deed and had hidden the body.
Let me share my conclusion with you early, so you can judge what is coming. Most feminists have been loathe to go the whole way in equality. There has been, among many of those who claim to seek equity, a desire nonetheless to perpetuate many of the myths about women. "Sugar and spice and everything nice, that is what little girls (and big women) are made of." The culture still teaches that violence is a "guy thing," perhaps a result of "testosterone poisoning." On those "rare" occasions when women are violent, it is invariably explained away by the terrible things men have done to them.
A fair summary of the enlightened culture is that men and women are equal, except that men are violent and women are naturally loving. This is not exactly what I would call equality.
I will suggest to you that Mother's Day, if good mothering is inherent in the woman's genes, is nothing to celebrate. But it is worth celebrating if it represents an accomplishment. I believe there is abundant evidence that we have chosen to ignore that shows that women are more similar to men than we acknowledge, and that good mothering is indeed an accomplishment worthy of celebration.
[women and violence]
The source of my enlightenment and the shattering of the stereotypes I had accepted, is the feminist author, Patricia Pearson, whose 1997 book When She Was Bad is subtitled Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence. It is Pearson's contention that:
our refusal to concede female contributions to violence are manifold . . affects our capacity to promote ourselves as autonomous and responsible beings.. . [and] affects our ability to develop a literature about ourselves that encompasses the full array of human emotion and experience.
Pearson comes to that conclusion after carefully documented chapters examining: the nature of female aggression, women who aggress newborns and infants, the use of children as pawns, women's assaults of spouses and lovers, multiple murderesses, and women as partners in violent crimes. Until you look at the evidence, you may have the feeling that she is some kind of nut, making stuff up, but the evidence is abundant and clear.
[I am reminded of the great scholar, Erwin Goodenough, who visited my seminary. When he set out to study Jewish art, he was assured that because of the commandment against graven images there was no such thing. His lifetime work was collecting some ten or fifteen volumes of great Jewish art over the centuries - each piece of which had been deemed an exception to the rule because "everyone 'knew' there was no such thing."]
It is Pearson's contention that our dealing with the violence of women is in the same category. We have prejudices which blind us to the reality - we deal with each instance as an exception..
What better day than Mother's Day to attempt to shake your prejudiced assumptions and to affirm the equality in place of the common and comfortable portrayal of women as weak victims. What greater honor is there than to welcome women to full partnership in the human species?
[illustrations]
I found revelations on virtually every page of Pearson's book.
She began with the awful story of Anthony Riggs, the soldier who returned from the Gulf War, only to be gunned down on the streets of Detroit. The incident received national attention. Then the police found that the killer was the brother of Anthony's wife, Toni, who had promised him half of $200,000 insurance money. She was not prosecuted and collected the money. Later she tried to get an undercover policeman to kill the guy who had turned her and her brother in. She was finally prosecuted for soliciting murder in both cases.
It is a fact that 87,000 women were arrested for committing violent crimes in 1994. In a study of Chicago homicides from 1966-96, it was found that the risk for an African American male of being killed by an intimate partner was twice the risk of an African American woman. 65% of the men killed in domestic violence had no recorded history whatever of violence. In 86 cases, the man tried to leave the woman; in 60 cases he had left her.
Pearson reports that women commit more than 50% of the physical child abuse, an equal portion of sibling violence, an equal portion of the assaults on the elderly, 1/4 of child sexual abuse, and what she refers to as "a fair preponderance of spousal assaults."
[maternal violence against infants]
In a chapter she calls, "The Problem That Still Has No Name," in which she deals with violence against newborns and infants, Pearson suggests that science has been used to try to reinforce the myth of a unique mother-child bond, largely in service of the division of labor that would keep women in the home rather than out competing with men.
"When men were forced into the factories and mines, women came to symbolize the nurturant safety of the home and took on attributes of softness and sentimentality they hadn't possessed before. As labor divisions grew starker, so did the character attributes of gender."
But, she observes, "Idealizing women into a tender hearted class of perfect mothers does not lead them to behave that way."
Pearson reports the experience of Dr. Stuart Asch, a psychiatrist in New York City who began his career by counseling pregnant women in the obstetrics ward. He was surprised how many of them had a lot of ambivalence about pregnancy and some crazy thoughts about killing their babies. He started to do some follow up studies which revealed that a significant percentage of those who had shared with thoughts about killing their babies, subsequently lost their babies to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He published his suspicions and was immediately subjected to a massive attack from people who did not challenge his data, but his right to even think such a thing about mothers.
There was a strange story in Schenectady, New York, the closest city to Albany, where I grew up. In the 70's and 80's, the Tinning family had the tragic experience of losing nine children to SIDS in fourteen years. One by one their mother would take them to the hospital in a state of unconsciousness and they would die - some not the first time, but subsequently. There were occasional calls to the abuse hotline from suspicious neighbors and nurses, but for the most part people were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the parents. The cause of death was generally recorded as SIDS, because for the most part that means "who knows?" After the last, it was discovered that Marybeth Tinning, the mother, had been smothering her babies in order to get the attention of the doctors and the sympathy of her friends. There is a psychiatric diagnosis of something called Munchausen's Syndrome, for people who hurt themselves in various ways in order to get medical attention. There is now a new label called "Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy" for those mothers, like Marybeth Tinning who use their children as pawns to get that attention. Mrs. Tinning also, however, tried to kill her husband when he threatened to leave her.
A New York doctor, Alfred Steenschneider became an authority on the genetic component of SIDS when he treated the Hoyt family which lost five children to SIDS. He became an expert witness in trials all over the country when authorities became suspicious of multiple deaths in a family. 22 years after he published the sympathetic article which brought him to prominence, Waneta Hoyt, the mother of the babies he had studied, confessed that she had smothered them all.
In Chicago in 1979, Deborah Gedzius lost six children to SIDS. She, in fact, shot her husband in the head while he slept, and she wasnever charged in any of the deaths. Women, you see, are never violent without a reason.
[Let me be clear that I am NOT suggesting that all cases attributed to SIDS are due to parental violence or neglect. I am suggesting that some are. The fact that the concept maternal violence is so repugnant to us makes it hard for us to see it when it is the cause.]
Pearson reports on Kathleen Householder of Rippon, West Virginia who smashed her 2 week old baby's head with a rock to stop it from fussing; Josephine Mesa of San Diego who battered her two month old with a toilet plunger; and Sheryl Lynn Massip of Orange County, California who put her colicky baby on the road and ran over him with a car. In England, there is a law which is called the Infanticide Act which used to provide that mothers could not be charged with murder in the death of newborns, because mother's were not capable of killing newborns unless they were mentally ill. The act was later extended to include children up to one year old on the assumption that it would have to be the result of some kind of mental illness - perhaps the effect of lactation.
[spousal abuse]
There is also the whole hidden issue of spousal abuse. We want to believe that women are victims and men are perpetrators - it is neater that way. There was a 1978 study conducted by the Kentucky Commission on Violence Against Women which revealed that 38% of domestic violence is committed by women. Actually, the word "revealed" is not accurate because the commission succeeded for some time in withholding from the public any knowledge of that outcome. In 1980 there was a study in New Hampshire which showed that while 12% of men admitted to having "hit, slapped or kicked their domestic partner," the percentage for women was 11.6%. The study was widely attacked by people who "knew it couldn't be true." The researchers repeated it in 1985 and tried to be even more careful about the questions. The results were comparable and even revealed that women were just as likely to initiate violence as were men.
Domestic violence against men is even more hidden than domestic violence against women used to be, because most men are not willing to admit that they have been beaten by a woman, and when they do report it, there is a better chance that they will not be believed by people who are culturally conditioned to disbelieve that women can attack men without provocation.
In recent years we have had hit tv movies that gave sympathetic portrayals of women who murdered men - "The Burning Bed" in which Farrah Fawcett portrayed Francine Hughes, and "Overkill: the Arlene Wuornos Story" in which Jean Smart played the role of the woman who shot and robbed seven different men who picked her up hitchhiking, and claimed self-defense. Pearson asks where the "rangy, gritty, foul-mouthed and frighteningly volatile" person was in the tv depiction of the "pensive, kind, needy, and melancholic" victim of child abuse. Have you seen a sympathetic portrayal of John Wayne Gacy or Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer on television. They were all abused terribly as children, but that abuse is not seen as a justification for their later behavior since they are males.
Kathleen Daly did a study of the pre-sentencing reports on criminals in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1/3 of the cases involving women, there were reports of having been abused as a child. This was true in only 10% of the cases involving men. When she checked into it, she found that the social workers were asking women about their abuse histories and did not ask the men because they didn't think it mattered.
One study showed that 80% of women convicted for killing believed they were not responsible, whether the victims were men, other women, or children. In many cases, the provocation that "drove them to it" was strictly verbal. In a survey of female prisoners in California in 1993, only 3.1% claimed that their crime was related to escaping abuse; 5.4% claimed it was to protect their children. Less than half of the 1,880 Adult female offenders in one study claimed to ever have been physically assaulted. No one has asked how many males were.
It is interesting that the FBI's statistics on serial killers exclude women because "everyone knows that women cannot be serial killers." Every time one is found, she is the exception to the rule. Time and time again.
[not all violent]
Again, as I said earlier, Patricia Pearson is not a misogynist - she is not suggesting that women are all violent, nor that they are more violent than men. The point of her book, and I believe it is well taken, is that there are consequences when we refuse to acknowledge the violence that is also a part of women. She says:
It affects our capacity to promote ourselves asautonomous and responsible beings. It affects our ability to develop a literature about ourselves that encompasses the full array of human emotion and experience. It demeans the right our victims have to be valued. And it radically impedes our ability to recognize dimensions of power that have nothing to do with formal structures of patriarchy. Perhaps, above all, the denial of women's aggression profoundly undermines our attempt as a culture to understand violence, to trace its causes, and to quell them.
[some violence is not physical]
There is a whole other dimension of this to which Pearson alludes in her book from time to time, but it confuses her main thrust. Given the nature of our society and the socialization process, women are less likely than men to act out their violence in physical ways themselves - some do, and that is her main point. But many do not, and yet they can still be violent - verbally abusive, manipulative, destructive. While some studies show that young children are equally aggressive, male and female, many of the female ones learn to redirect their violent emotions. One really cruel story Pearson tells is about the girl who told her eight year old brother that he was really twelve, but that the family was lying to him because he was so retarded that he acted like an eight year old. Talk about mean! And look at the verbally violent games which schoolgirls act out. There certainly have been mothers who have destroyed or crippled their children with words and withheld emotional links. But these are hard to count.
So, it's Mothers' Day. None of what I have said, none of what I have tried to point out about the other side of the coin, takes away from the reality that many of us, possibly even the great majority of us, have been blessed with mothers who loved and nurtured us, and who are given too little credit for that. One of the problems with some feminists is that, while maintaining the mother mystique, they have sometimes denigrated the role of mother even more than the patriarchs have, suggesting that the raising of healthy children is not a significant achievement. Note please that I said "some" and "sometimes" not "all" nor "always."
[The Value of Mother's Day]
I believe that in transitional times like ours, Mother's Day is, in fact, a very important observance. Not for commercial nor sentimental reasons, but because it invites us to look at what is involved in the rearing of children.
There have been women who have been trapped into motherhood because of ignorance or social pressure, who never should have been. There have been women who have been imprisoned by societal demands on mothers that suggested that they had no right or qualifications to do anything but mothering. Certainly much of the violence by mothers against children has been a result of these conflicts.
If we were willing to look realistically at the roles of mothers and fathers and take them seriously, value them as a society, celebrate them, but at the same time, decline to make them mystical and mythical, perhaps we could work our way slowly toward a new age in which every child would be a wanted child, and every child a loved and nurtured child. If we were to take Mothers Day to heart, to use it as a day on which we take stock, unafraid, of what motherhood is really about and how we do and do not value it, it could prove to be one of the most important days of the year.