stfusexists:

I, and many mothers of my generation, thought that when our daughters came of age, they would enter a world of unprecedented equality, with autonomy over their own bodies and life choices, and the guarantee they would be paid according to their value in the workplace, not by virtue of their genitalia. So how does reality stack up to that twenty-year-old belief?

To borrow from a movie title from those early 90s, reality bites. Not only haven’t rights and opportunities for women in this country improved, they are on the decline. The world our daughters are inheriting looks like the one in which our mothers or even our grandmothers came of age. In 2011, the year my daughter graduated from college, state legislatures enacted 83 laws to restrict or even eliminate access to abortions. In the first three months of 2012, 944 bills were introduced in state legislatures related to reproductive health and rights, targeting access to birth control as well as abortions.

Not content to limiting their attacks on women to the female body, several states have moved onto the workplace, with Wisconsin Republicans leading the charge to eviscerate federal statutes, including the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, that require equal pay for equal work.

—Thoughts For Our Daughters (and Sons) On Mother’s Day

(via lipsredasroses)

“Before the brunches, before the gifts and greeting cards, Mother’s Day was a time for mourning women to remember fallen soldiers and work for peace.

When the holiday went commercial, its greatest champion gave everything to fight it, dying penniless and broken in a sanitarium. Of course, Mother’s Day marched on without her and is today celebrated, in various forms, on a global scale.

As early as the 1850s, West Virginia women’s organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis held Mother’s Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions and try to lower infant mortality by fighting disease and curbing milk contamination, according to historian Katharine Antolini of West Virginia Wesleyan College.

The groups also tended wounded soldiers of both sides during the U.S. Civil War from 1861 to 1865, she added.

In the postwar years Jarvis and other women organized Mother’s Friendship Day picnics and other events as pacifist events uniting former foes. Julia Ward Howe, for one—best known as the composer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—issued a widely read “Mother’s Day Proclamation” in 1870, calling for women to take an active political role in promoting peace.

Around the same time, Jarvis had initiated a Mothers’ Friendship Day for Union and Confederate loyalists across her state. But it was her daughter Anna who was most responsible for what we call Mother’s Day—and who would spend most of her later life fighting what it had become.”

Continue.