Mixed Moss

 Inspired by a post entitled “Labor Day in February: When Our Work Matters” by parke on his blog, Tales by the Fire.

 A couple of years back there was a billboard advertising a mini-van and the tagline was, “What idiot coined the phrase ‘Stay-at-home Mom’?â€? And this, in my experience is true on many levels. Do Mom’s play taxi-driver for soccer games? Yes. But that is not all they do, either. They do more community service work and philanthropic work than you can imagine. The number of hours of service they put in is unbelieveable. They run most of the community youth organizations in existence, with the exception of the Boy Scouts– and even then, in my experience, they do a lot behind the scenes. 

I don’t mean to sound like I’m bashing the men. That is as far from my intention as it can well be. But every year I grow more and more certain that the largest untapped resource in our nation is not the oil under Alaskan soil; but rather, the time and ceaseless energy of women who do not work outside the home. Throughout history, they have been great agents of social change, despite the relatively little political power granted them at times. They spearheaded reform efforts ranging from the medical treatment of the mentally ill, to child labour, to orphanage reform, to education of low-income families, to the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks did not just feel lazy one day and decide not to move from her seat on the bus. She was involved with the civil rights movement long before that famous day. Everyone knows that when Martin Luther King Jr. died, it fell to Coretta Scott King to help lead us in the direction of his dream; not many know that she had pushed him to become involved in the first place. Everyone has seen the movie and read the book called Little Women; but not many know that the woman who wrote it worked tirelessly for social reform and that many of the little words of wisdom tucked into it here and there which seem to us like old-fashioned homilies, were in fact startling statements in her day.

But my favorite reformer is Jane Addams. The daughter of a man wealthy enough to give her an education at a women’s college long before most young ladies attended universities, she suffered from a series of illnesses brought on, as she later expressed, by sheer lack of purpose as much as anything. She travelled the world to see various doctors, and at some point a friend took her to see the reform work that was being conducted in London. Up until now she had never met an Anglo-Saxon living in degredation and despair; were she was from, it was always the Irish, Italian, Polish, and Black who lived that way. Inspired with the notion that the poor and the prostitutes in her home city of Chicago did what they did not out of disposition but out of circumstance, she got together a few other rich spinsters getting ill for lack of something to do, and they founded a Settlement House–the first of it’s kind in America–in the poorest part of Chicago. Some of the children they helped went on to graduate from what would later become the University of Illinois–Chicago. She would eventually be honored with a Nobel prize for her work.

Imagine what we could do if we could just harness the energy of women. Be brave! Be bold! Be dedicated! Well-behaved women rarely make history.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.