E. B. White's Dilemma

The author E.B. White once complained about a common problem: "I arise in the morning", he wrote, "torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." The quote seems particularly relevant on a beautiful spring day when the world outside my window is irresistibly beautiful. On such a day, I find it difficult to focus on the ongoing war in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the troubles right here in our own country. I wander outside, clippers and trowel in hand, to the garden...I cannot resist.

Mother's Day is coming up: May 8th. The day presents us with that E.B. White dilemma: to enjoy the world, or work to improve it. Advertisers are gearing up. Their point of view is clear: enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. Eat, shop, pamper...relax, take a break... As with so many other holidays, the original intention of the day is lost it the consumer blitz.

In the United States, the idea for Mother's Day began with Julia Ward Howe's 1878 Proclamation urging women to rise up and use the day to promote peace and reject war. Stop sending your sons to war "...to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country," she wrote, "will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." Rise up, she urged, leave the comfort of your homes on Mother's Day, to discuss and settle issues of peace, in the same way men leave home and family to settle issues of war.

Anna Jarvis, a woman from West Virginia, revived the idea for the holiday around the turn of the century. She was inspired by her own mother, a community activist who had organized Mother's Day Work Clubs in the mid-1800s. These were groups of lay women who worked with medical professionals to improve health conditions and expand medical care for women and children. Located in an area claimed by both the North and the South, in deeply divided communities, the health clubs became neutral sites, offering medical help to soldiers from both sides during the Civil War. Later, her mother organized "Mother's Friendship Days", bringing people together to celebrate peace in those communities that had been so bitterly divided .

After her mother's death Anna Jarvis and her followers organized a campaign to have Mother's Day declared a national holiday honoring all women whose work -- in the home, the workplace, the community and in the larger world � sustains and promotes justice and peace. Some ten years later, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the official proclamation.

It's been more than 100 years since Julia Ward Howe's rousing proclamation urged us to use our power and influence as women and mothers to put an end to war. It's time to reclaim the spirit of that day! Let us gather together once again on Mother's Day, as she implored us to do.

And this will be our gift to one another. To stand together in celebration for the work that has been done, and to commit ourselves to the struggles that lie ahead.

- Claudia Lefko