Carl,
Your family history does sound, "All American". Grandma Jarvis' attitudes sound
similar to the Jews whose attitudes are liberal on all topics, except Israel.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2020 11:23 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: FW: May 9, 2020
Hi Miriam,
My grandmother Jarvis swore that Anna Jarvis is my great great great Aunt. I'm
not finding the link, but Anna's parents did move to the Grafton, West Virginia
area, where they raised their family. The area already had a large number of
Jarvis's. John Jarvis, my several times over great grandfather, was born
around 1756 in what then was the Virginia Colony, but I have never found the
family connection with the Anna Jarvis family.
Anna was named after her mother, Anna Jarvis. She never married, so if she is
a great great great aunt, it must be through a brother.
Although my Grandmother Jarvis was no blood relation, she was very proud to
claim Anna as "family". Grandma Jarvis was born in Web City, Missouri in March
of 1874, and died in September of 1960. As a boy, I questioned Grandma Jarvis
about life back in "the olden days". She was more than happy to sit with her
little grandson and spin many tales. Her sister and brother-in-law also lived
for some years in Seattle, and Aunt Ollie told me many of the same stories.
I think I've mentioned before that I have a more certain family link from my
Grandmother Jarvis, born to Tom and Sarah Hickman, through Sarah, born Sarah
Davis, daughter of an older brother of Jefferson Davis. While my dad accepted
Anna Jarvis as a family member, he never claimed Jefferson Davis.
Grandma Jarvis was raised on a small plantation near Webb City.
Before the Civil War, her father owned 4 slaves. He was not a wealthy
plantationer, and worked alongside his slaves. After Lincoln declared the
slaves emancipated, Great Great Grandpa Hickman told his four slaves that they
could continue to live on his land, paying with their labor for their huts and
food, or they were free to go. Free to go?
Where? So they stayed, living about the same as they had lived under slavery.
Grandmother Jarvis was raised by a Nanny, who also served as a "wet nurse" when
Grandma was a baby. Like so many Southern white children, Grandma played with
the slave children along with the children of white neighbors. Grandma told me
many times, that she did not have a prejudiced bone in her body...as long as
they,(the Colored) stayed in their place. I never could get Grandma to explain
just where "Their Place" was. Grandma Jarvis was an Abraham Lincoln
Republican...her words, and a Presbyterian of the Bible Belt sort. Whenever my
dad did anything she believed to be "Unchristian" she would lecture him,
reading long passages from the Bible and throwing stove wood at him if he dared
to look away. Dad always said his mother "led him away from the Church", as
well as turning him into a Radical.
Grandmother Jarvis lived her last years in the Yesler Project, a low income
housing development in Seattle. She spoke out against FDR and Governor
Rossellini, our Democratic Governor, responsible for establishing the state's
old age pension.
So, like all of us, she lived with no regard concerning her many contradictions.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/10/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
Is the Anna Jarvis whom she mentions, related to you?
Miriam
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American
<heathercoxrichardson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2020 12:21 AM
To: miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: May 9, 2020
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you
that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother.
But
“Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in
the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of
the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War
convinced American women that women must take control of politics from
the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed
to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of
women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.
May 9, 2020
<http://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxtkEGOwyAMRU8TlhEhUNIFi9n0GhEBt7GGA
AKnbW4
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lw0_0H
9AExxhJ0> Heather Cox Richardson
May 10
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you
that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother.
But
“Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in
the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of
the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War
convinced American women that women must take control of politics from
the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed
to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of
women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.
The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in
the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of
heroism discovered that long-range weapons turned death into tortured
anonymity.
Men
were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches,
or transformed into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their
lives away.
The women who had watched their men march off to war were haunted by
its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons. The men who did come
home were scarred in body and mind.
Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.
But out of the war also came a new sense of empowerment. Women had
bought bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed
farms, harvested fields, worked in war industries, reared children,
and nursed soldiers.
When
the war ended, they had every intention of continuing to participate
in national affairs. But the Fourteenth Amendment, which established
that African American men were citizens, did not include women. In
1869, women organized the National American Woman’s Suffrage
Association and the American Woman’s Suffrage Association to promote
women’s right to have a say in American government.
From her home in Boston, Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the
American Woman’s Suffrage Association. She was an enormously talented
writer, who had penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic in the early
years of the Civil War, a hymn whose lyrics made it a point to note
that Christ was “born of woman.”
Howe was drawn to women’s rights because the laws of her time meant
that her children belonged to her abusive husband. If she broke free
of him, she would lose any right to see her children, a fact he threw
at her whenever she threatened to leave him. She was not at first a
radical in the mold of reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, believing that
women had a human right to equality with men. Rather, she believed
strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to perform in the
world.
For Howe, the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to
emancipation might justify its terrible bloodshed. The outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was another story. She remembered:
"I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary
character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the
issue having been one which might easily have been settled without
bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, “Why do not the mothers
of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that
human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?”
Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood
and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote
an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and
always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder.” But
women did not have to accept this state of affairs, she wrote. Mothers
could command their sons to stop the madness.
"Arise, women! Howe commanded. Say firmly: “We will not have great
questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come
to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall
not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be
too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be
trained to injure theirs.”
Howe had her document translated into French, Spanish, Italian,
German, and Swedish, and distributed it as widely as her extensive
contacts made possible. She believed that her Women’s Peace Movement
would be the next great development in human history, ending war just
as the anti-slavery movement had ended human bondage. She called for a
“festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should
be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines” to be held around the
world on June 2 of every year, a date that would permit open-air
meetings.
Howe organized international peace conferences and American states
developed their own Mothers’ Day festivals. But Howe quickly gave up
on her project.
She realized that there was much to be done before women could come
together on such a momentous scale. She turned her attention to
women’s clubs “to constitute a working and united womanhood.”
As she worked to unite women, she threw herself into the struggle for
women’s suffrage, understanding that in order to create a more just
and peaceful society, women must take up their rightful place as equal
participants in American politics.
Perhaps Anna Jarvis remembered seeing her mother participate in an
original American Mothers’ Day when she decided to honor her own
mother in the early twentieth century. And while we celebrate modern
Mother’s Day in this momentous year of 2020, it’s worth remembering
the original Mothers’ Day, and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must
make their voices heard.
If you liked this post from
<http://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxtkMGOhCAQRL9GjgYVlDlw2Mv8hkHoGTuLY
KCZGf9
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4rBY4A
2AJ2Z5kptJSAdMwSzeHBXXLrq-f2ejh10gHf2QATpOtYOhBiH28SqoYu1qKD_C_EDKGuAP
g> Letters from an American, why not share it?
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-DomDD AbUX74UYfzm8MdGyoAz7zikSYPmKBqVQnx56VQBvLFUH_R-MXKOaYEw> Share
© 2020 Heather Cox Richardson Unsubscribe PO Box 720263, San
Francisco, CA 94172
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