Sunday Journal #21

Women, mothers, and what we owe them

Welcome to Sunday Journal, a chance to start your week out with short, quiet reflections and advice for life.

This effort started with a handwritten journal I keep for each of my children, designed to give them a sense of how to become the best version of themselves. If you find this valuable, please share it with others.

Each edition contains three sections: reflections to put into practice, an inspirational quote, and an image to contemplate.

This issue is dedicated to the tireless work of women, particularly mothers.

Reflection

After September 11, a quote from Fred Rogers resurfaced that has since become a kind of civic psalm for moments of tragedy:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

The wisdom in that counsel belongs to two people — Rogers, who shared it, and his mother, who gave it to him.

The helpers in our lives are often women. Mothers, sisters, aunts, wives — they provide the nurturing environments where we first learn that the world is not only frightening but full of people moving toward the frightened. They protect us, fight for us, and labor tirelessly on our behalf, whether leading organizations, teaching classrooms, or simply sitting with us at the end of a hard day. Too often, they are overlooked. They shouldn’t be.

On a day set aside to honor mothers, the truest tribute may be the one Rogers modeled: to see the helpers, to name them, and to carry their wisdom forward into the world — as he did, for the rest of his life.

Quote

“[A]s a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw... I must speak for the oppressed — who cannot speak for themselves.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1853

Image

Woman's Mission by George Elgar Hicks, 1862-3

We depart from our usual cadence here, presenting three images instead of one. George Elgar Hicks’ triptych is worth including on Mother’s Day. Tom Taylor described Woman’s Mission (1862–3) as a picture ‘in three compartments’, while other critics described three ‘tableaux, set in one frame’.¹ The three canvases ­­­­­­were given the titles Guide of Childhood (fig.1), Companion of Manhood (fig.2), and Comfort of Old Age (fig.3).

In each painting, Woman’s Mission depicts a young woman — the same woman in all three images — fulfilling her responsibilities as mother, wife and daughter: clearing her child’s path of brambles and guiding his steps, supporting her husband in a moment of overwhelming grief, and ministering to her ailing father in his final years.

While this is merely a vision of three roles, women inhabit a far greater number of roles, acting as true caretakers of humanity. May we always remember that and celebrate them.

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1. George Elgar Hicks’s Woman’s Mission and the Apotheosis of the Domestic by Kendall Smaling Wood, Tate Papers No. 22, August 2014