Special Episode: Mother's Day, Memorial Day, and The God of War - A history and reading mash-up
Mother’s Day and Memorial Day show up like clockwork, but the stories we tell about them are missing the peaceful roots. We go back to the nineteenth century to recover what got sanded down: Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation is not soft-focus nostalgia, it’s a direct anti-war demand for women to refuse a world that sends husbands home “reeking with carnage” and trains sons to injure other people’s sons.
From there, we follow the on-the-ground organizing that made “Mother’s Day” real before it became a greeting-card script. Anne Reeves Jarvis builds Mother’s Day work clubs to fight epidemics with sanitation and community care, then uses that same infrastructure to insist on reconciliation after the Civil War. We also track how peace activism collides with World War I, and how Mother’s Day messaging gets co-opted into a patriotic storyline that praises sacrifice while making dissent feel shameful.
We then connect the holiday arc to The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sooj and Barbara Mor, which argues that patriarchy sustains itself through a perpetual state of war, backed by the global religion of money.
Finally, we share the lesser-known origins of Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina, where freed Black communities honored Union dead with reburial, flowers, hymns, and a massive procession in 1865, an act of memory that looks a lot more like coming together than propaganda.
If this reframes how you think about American patriotism, the military-industrial complex, or the meaning of remembrance, subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review. What part of this history hit you hardest?
Show Notes Will Be Updated Soon!
More info:
Mother's Day https://www.history.com/articles/mothers-day-peace-movement-origins
Memorial Day https://time.com/5836444/black-memorial-day/
MUSIC STUFF:
THE MOTHER’S DAY Music by Bomb Sound from Pixabay
National Anthem by Ievgen Poltavskyi from Pixabay
PATRIOT song Music by Florews from Pixabay
MoneyCha-Ching Sound Effect by u_byub5wd934 from Pixabay
Spirit of Victory Music by Hoà Huỳnh from Pixabay
Doom sound effect Sound Effect by MrDwarf92 from Pixabay
Civil War FanFare Sound Effect by Sergei Chetvertnykh from Pixabay
Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye Music by LAURENT BUCZEK from Pixabay
John Brown's Body Music by Lisa van Beergen from Pixabay
Credits
Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI
Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia
Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio
Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies
Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers
Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.
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