MOTHERS
A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer
Delivered at First UU Church Ann Arbor
May 8, 2005




Being a mother is a full-time, complex, dangerous, creative, stunningly 
difficult and enormously important work. It begins for the biological mother 
or the adoptive mother with a long period of gestation and preparation 
leading to birth or adoption.  Neither is easy. 

But those processes are just the first and shortest step in being a mother. 
Mothers spend long years nurturing and caring for their brood, one or ten or 
hundreds or thousands. The gray hair and the weariness come from this 
longer-term stretch of labor. 

Mothers are of many different kinds, three of which we shall briefly discuss 
this morning. The order of the discussion is chronological, the one first born 
to the one born last.

Mother Jones was born  Mary Harris in County Cork, Ireland in July, 1837. 
At the age of 14 or 15, she and her desperately poor mother and siblings 
joined her father in Toronto. Raised a Roman Catholic, she was surrounded 
in her church by images and talk of Mary, the Virgin Mother, a symbol of 
motherhood. The Mary of these immigrant Catholics was meek, humble, and 
pious, but one who would approach even God on behalf of her children.

Mary Harris became a teacher, first in Canada and then in Monroe, Michigan. 
Then she became a dressmaker in Chicago. From there she moved on to 
Memphis, Tennessee, where again she worked as a teacher. She met and 
married George Jones. Jones was a member of a fledgling union, the 
International Iron Molders Union, and Mary got first hand acquaintance 
through him of the importance of unions. It would become one of the major 
themes of her life.

In 1867, Mother Jones wrote in her autobiography, “a yellow fever epidemic 
swept Memphis…One by one, my four little children sickened and died. I 
washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial. My husband caught 
the fever and died. I sat alone through nights of grief. No one came to me. 
No one could. Other homes were as stricken as mine.”

It would be 30 years before she would be called mother again, and then in a 
very different context. She left Memphis with the burden of her grief, but also 
with an awareness of the misery caused by greed and the knowledge of what 
could be done for that misery, namely, organize, unite, work together as a 
collective. She was on her way to becoming a champion of union men and 
their families. 

It is not known for sure how she became radicalized or how she came to see 
herself as an active force in the movement to unionize labor. Her 
autobiography is untrustworthy. We know that she was part of Coxey’s 
Army in 1894, that march to Washington D.C., to urge the government to 
create jobs for the unemployed. She marched ahead of them, raising money 
and provisions. She was 57, beginning a life on the road she lived for the next 
three decades. Dressed in black, matronly clothes, she carried the banner for 
justice for her children, the sons and daughters of labor.

She was first called Mother Jones by a newspaper in 1897 during a miner’s 
strike in which she became involved. It was a title she then claimed for herself 
the rest of her life. She worked for the Socialist Party, the United Mine 
Workers, and on her own trying to make the economic situation of 
Americans more equitable. She believed that workers could and must 
collaborate with each other, educate themselves, and lay claim to the great 
democratic traditions of this country. She saw the rich as greedy and immoral 
obstacles in the way of achieving that goal.

In 1897, she became part of the coal miners’ strike in Pennsylvania. As 
would be typical of her, she gave speeches, organized food from local 
farmers, and staged rallies to lift the spirits of the miners. This strike was won 
and the pay cut that brought it about cancelled. She took a simple lesson 
from this experience: only worker power confronting the greedy owners 
could bring about the changes needed. 

Later, she would be involved in coal mining strikes in West Virginia and 
Colorado and in labor agitation of all kinds for unionization and socialism. 
She was an utterly fearless woman engaged in work that was highly 
dangerous. Owners sent in scabs. They also sent in private thugs who often 
assaulted those on strike, blew up miners’ homes, even kidnapped children 
to depress the spirits of the strikers. Mother Jones just kept coming, well into 
her 80’s.

In a sense, it could be said that the union—mainly the United Mine Workers 
for which she worked for a small salary off and on for many years, but also 
any union for which she happened to be laboring—that the union replaced 
her lost family and that she felt her motherhood of these “boys”, as she 
called the miners, most passionately. 

They in turn thought of her as “the star of hope,” or,in Eugene Debs’ phrase, 
as “a modern Joan of Arc.” One observer wrote of her after a successful 
strike of coal miners in Pennsylvania, “How does she do it? By the greatest 
of all powers, the power of love. She loves her ‘boys’—be they Polish or 
Bohemian or Irish or American—and she teaches them to love her.”

She had a remarkable ability to influence women as well as men. She was 
very much committed to the traditional American and European ideal of the 
woman who takes care of her family, who cooks and cleans and nurses and 
stays out of the workaday world. She saw workers’ wives as needing to 
support their men in strikes and protests and union activities in order to 
provide for their families.

Once she said that “in no sense of the word am I in sympathy with woman’s 
suffrage. In a long life of study of these questions I have learned that women 
are out of place in political work. There already is a great responsibility upon 
women’s shoulders—that of rearing rising generations.”

She had been the mother of four children, and the terrible loss of those 
children had burned itself into her soul. She wanted every child to be well 
cared for, and she felt that only mothers in the home could do that.

Yet she was a radical feminist who believed in socialist ideals of equality. She 
spent the last half of her life doing “men’s” work in her own way. She was 
very good at it. She had a mesmerizing speaking voice and presence, no 
small part of the reason she was described by one opponent as “the most 
dangerous woman in America.” More than once she was able to command a 
presidential audience. She had private conversations with wealthy and 
influential men like the Rockefellers senior and junior.

In 1902, she led a children’s crusade to get children out of the factories and 
into schools. Because she also felt that mothers  belonged at home, she  
labored like a man to rid the factories of women and children by getting the 
owners to pay  sufficient wages to the man so that the whole family did not 
have to work in those tedious and often perilous jobs.

Like a mother, she poured courage into her children. Here are some of her 
words in the Colorado Coal Strike of the second decade of the 20th century : 
”You have allowed a few men to boss you, to starve you, to abuse your 
women and children, to deny you education, to make peons of you, lower 
and less free than the Negroes before the Civil War. What is the matter with  
you? Are you afraid? Do you fear your pitiful little bosses?…I can’t believe 
it. I can’t believe you are so cowardly…”

Her own statements about the owners of the mines made clear she was not 
afraid. She described John D. Rockefeller Jr. as an “insulting rat,” and his 
father as “the greatest murderer this nation had ever produced.” She 
thundered at the owners of the steel mills after the first world war that “the 
war…has made the steel lords richer than the emperors of old Rome.” 

Her biographer, Elliott J, Gorn, wrote of her, “The way Mother Jones lived 
her life was breathtaking. She tailored her appearance to match every 
sentimental notion about mothers. Then she subverted the very idea of 
genteel womanhood on which such stereotypes were based with her 
vituperative, profane, electric speeches. Women—especially old women—
were not supposed to have opinions about politics and economics; they were 
not supposed to travel alone; they were too delicate for controversy. Yet 
there she was, haranguing workers, berating politicians, attacking the 
‘pirates’, and telling women to take to the streets, all under the cover of 
sacred motherhood.”

She was certainly not a lady by conventional standards, but she was one hell 
of a woman and, in her own way, one hell of a mother!

So was Jane Addams.

Addams was born in a small Illinois town in 1860, her father a successful 
businessman and state legislator known for his moral uprightness. Her mother 
died in her third year, leaving young Jennie to cling close to her father. She 
learned from him a deep sense of anguish at life as it is.

She recalled his overwhelming grief at the death of his friend, Abraham 
Lincoln, when she was not yet five. She learned early about what she called 
“the riddle of life and death pressed hard: once to be young, to grow old and 
to die, everything came to that, and then a mysterious journey out into the 
Unknown.” 

Later she was to recall a family of her acquaintance who had lost four sons in 
the Civil War and then the fifth died in a hunting accident a few months after 
returning alive from that conflict. She wrote of that tragedy that  “our young 
hearts swelled in first rebellion against that which Walter Pater calls ‘the 
inexplicable shortcomings or misadventure on the part of life itself’; we were 
overwhelmed by that grief at things as they are, so much more mysterious 
and intolerable than those griefs which we think dimly to trace to man’s own 
wrongdoing.”

If this compassionate young woman could not change the universe—“things 
as they are”—she could work to change things traceable to human mistakes 
and wickedness. That is precisely what she spent most of her life doing.

She attended Rockford Female Seminary, where she met Ellen Gates Starr, 
with whom she would found and run Hull House. In the same year that she 
graduated, 1881,her father died, and whatever illusions she might still have 
harbored about the fairness of life vanished. 

She spent eight more years wandering and wondering, searching for her 
mission. This included two extended trips to Europe and a mostly 
comfortable life. What she learned, as her biographer, Jean Bethke Elshtain 
observes, is that “you cannot be universal anywhere but in your own 
backyard…She arrived at an ethic that “can better be enacted than 
formalized,’ an ethic that stresses ‘not the attractiveness of extreme risk or 
the darkest teachings of violence and domination’ but instead ‘a celebration 
of the everyday, prosaic world, with its undramatic practices and values…’”

The center of her life became Hull House in 1889. She had decided that 
marriage was fine, but not fine for her. She had further decided with her 
friend Ellen Starr that they would move to one of the poorest areas of 
Chicago, buy a home and live in it, make that home a center of culture and 
education and reform. It was a beautiful place, with exquisite décor and 
furnishings, designed to uplift the mind and the heart.

Its location on Halstead Street placed it in an area with nine churches and 250 
saloons, populated almost exclusively by immigrants, by Addams’ count 
some 18 different national groups. Hull House sponsored classes, lectures, 
dietetic instructions, athletics, and clubs for men, women, girls, and boys. It 
had a kindergarten, a nursery, a playground, a day-care center, a drama 
group, a choral group, a Shakespeare Club, and a Plato Club. 

Hull House was a place of beauty midst immense poverty, not a beauty that 
mocked the traditions of the people she served, but one that respected their 
traditions and their aesthetic sense. Hard as it was, for example, Addams 
came in time to see alcohol as a means of expressing hospitality.

She also came to understand, especially under the influence of Florence 
Kelley when she came to live at Hull House in 1891, the importance of 
listening to the immigrants for ways of solving some of their problems. 
Addams came to have a high regard for bottom-up solutions, grounding this 
belief in democracy of the most fundamental kind. 

Perhaps most central to her active life was an understanding of the female 
body as mother. For her, the female is the symbol of generativity and of 
fecundity. To Addams, by choice never a biological mother, this image of 
motherhood extended far beyond the biological to include how one lives in 
society. Mothers, she felt, had a primary role to play in nurturing 
neighborhoods and cities as well as in nurturing families. Eventually, she 
broadened that maternal role to include nations.

Addams believed in the primary role of woman as mother. That role began in 
the home, but soon after the founding of Hull House, she recognized the 
need for social action and called on women to reach beyond the home in 
order to protect the home. 

She practiced what she preached. In 1894, appalled at the poor garbage 
removal in her neighborhood, she maneuvered herself into the position of 
Sanitary Inspector of the 19th ward. To perform this task, she and another 
Hull House resident walked behind the garbage collectors to be sure they 
were doing their job. So poorly did they do it that Addams purchased the 
contract for garbage removal herself. 

Elshtain describes what happened: “…she and Amanda Johnson dutifully 
followed the garbage wagons, and insisted that the number of wagons be 
increased to get the job done.. They were indefatigable. Landlords were taken 
to court for not providing proper garbage receptacles. Addams and Johnson 
arranged for the removal of dead animals whose rotting carcasses had 
befouled the streets and alleys.”

Addams took on racial issues, describing race as “the gravest situation” in 
American life. She fought on many fronts for equality for all people at a time 
when most white Americans thought it perfectly proper to discriminate 
against all people of color.

Addams understood the importance to old people of telling their stories. Not 
least among those she had in mind were the elderly immigrants, often without 
English, whose spirits sank as they contemplated their lives cut off from their 
roots. She made it possible for these people to tell their tales. She listened. 
She even arranged for many of them to be put into publishable form. She 
mothered those too old to make their way fully in the strange society of 
America to which fate had brought them.

Addams was a pacifist, a believer that antagonism was unnecessary. She 
viewed the Pullman Strike of 1894 in this light, and the Civil War as well. She 
saw humanity as a kind of family in which eruptions could from time to time 
arise, but in which the bonds of kinship were what mattered most.

John Dewey told of hearing from Ellen Starr about the early days of Hull 
House, when the whole enterprise was still viewed with suspicion by the 
people who lived around Halstead Street. Starr recounts how one time while 
talking about Hull House to some people, a man came up and spit in her face. 
She simply wiped off the spittle and went on talking, not paying any attention 
to the insult. 

It was that equanimity that earned the respect of the people and enabled Hull 
House to do its work.

When push came to shove and war came to the United States, Addams 
stood by her long held views that war is wrong. She had published a book 
about her convictions in 1907, NEWER IDEALS OF PEACE. The coming 
of war did not change her ideas about the nature of patriotism, that the only 
honorable patriotism is grounded in compassion for the citizens of the land 
not in the violent disturbance of war. 

She was a founder of the Women’s Peace Party in 1915, an organization that 
became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In the 
middle of the war, she and more than 1300 women from 12 countries met at 
the Hague in Holland and called for arbitration to begin immediately and 
violence to end. The women at that meeting issued a call for many noble 
objectives later to be implemented or at least attempted: the fruits of conquest 
should not be ratified, a permanent international court to mediate disputes 
should be established, no territorial transfers without the consent of the 
people, no secret treaties, free trade, freedom of the seas, universal 
disarmament, the extension of the suffrage to women.

Addams and those who shared her views were acting in the spirit of the first 
Mother’s Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe, that said among other 
things that “the sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does 
not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.”

Jane Addams was a lady, but she was, like Mother Jones, a very powerful, a 
very good woman, a tender, loving, smart, capable mother to so many in 
society who either had no mother or whose mother was simply not able to 
carry the burdens of life.

Then there is Tutu, Evelyn Emily Josephs Phifer, my mother, born June 11, 
1908, the day that her future husband’s parents were married. When her first 
grandchild was born, mother was asked how she would like to be called. She 
had already thought it out. “Tutu,” she said, “The Hawaiian word for 
grandmother.” Tutu it was from that day forward.

Mother grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, the daughter of immigrants 
from Baalbek, Lebanon. She had a very traditional southern upbringing  of 
the early 20th century, which meant she was taught to defer to men, to train to 
be a housewife and mother, and to practice a certain decorum and formality 
consistent with constantly being on display. This served her well when she 
married a minister, for until the last few decades it was universally true that 
ministers’ wives were scrutinized for the least social flaw or untoward 
behaviour. Nothing of that kind ever crossed my mother’s mind, I am sure.

She and dad were married 75 years ago today and enjoyed—really enjoyed—
71 years and nine months together. Mother’s first loyalty was to dad, a bond 
we children tried constantly to break and were never able to do. She 
understood that if the parents were held together by love, the children would 
prosper, even if in the moment they did not understand that.

There were three of us, born in 1932, 1938—my birth year—and 1947. 
Although because of the age discrepancies there were some differences in 
how we were parented, mostly dad and mother were the same throughout all 
the nearly 40 years of active parenting in which they were engaged.

Second only to her role as dad’s wife and his constant helper in the social 
whirl that was a large part of his Presbyterian ministry was her role as our 
mother. She made no pretense about being fair and objective about her sons. 
We were unquestionably the three finest boys who had ever lived. Brother 
Bill, writing about her after her death, said “I always told her that she was my 
unprejudiced mother; if I fell on my face, I would have fallen better than 
anyone.” She called my brother Bob, “my precious boy.”  High school 
classmates recall to this day mother’s distinct southern-accented voice 
ringing out at football games when I would do anything—score a touchdown, 
fumble the ball, miss a tackle, trip over my feet—“That’s my boy! That’s my 
boy!”

I did not always want to be her boy. I was often embarrassed by her effusive 
outpourings about things I did. To me they were just things I did. To her, 
they were signal achievements in the history of the human race: pretending to 
be Batman in my robe and Green Hornet mask; winning a fruit cake in a 
lottery at the Belle Meade theater; having lunch with Jane Goldberg when she 
and I were seven, my mother’s version of my first date.

Mother loved us fiercely and, as I came to appreciate in time, really was 
struck with wonder at almost anything we did. Not a bad attitude to have 
about your children, or about life. That it is truly wonder-full.

Mother was fastidious about her personal dress and the house she kept, an 
unfortunate trait with three energetic boys to handle. I can still see the look of 
horror on her face when I emerged from the coal bin, more covered in filth 
than Charles Schulz’s Pig-Pen character. I was told to stand stock still while 
she ran for the hose to wash me off before I could dirty anything.

She was also not happy when my nine year old right leg managed to drop 
kick the leg off her living room coffee table.

But somehow, despite initial anger about such episodes, and disappointments 
over things like my getting dismissed from dance class or  becoming a 
Unitarian Universalist, never held onto her anger for very long, she never told 
me I was worthless because I had not lived up to her expectations. She went 
on bragging.

Mother fixed meals to the personal specifications of her men, which 
sometimes meant cooking several different meals for one gathering at the 
dining room table. She did this effortlessly, or apparently so, like Andruw 
Jones drifting back for a fly ball. She made my lunches when I worked 
summer jobs, made my bed when I was too lazy to do so, made certain I got 
a haircut from time to time, bought my clothes and cleaned them, nursed my 
wounds, cared for me in my illnesses, and somehow smiled her way through 
the numerous crises I presented to her.

She never lost faith in me or my brothers. That’s not a bad definition of what 
it means to be a good mother, or a good father.

And she was a good mother, as well as a good woman. She bore the 
adversities of growing old with enormous grace, simply enduring the arthritis, 
the shingles and the post herpetic neuralgia, the osteoparosis, and the 
congestive heart failure, enduring these things with a smile, a laugh, a quiet 
rejoicing in the beauty of the flowers that surrounded her in Hawaii, the birds 
that sang to her, the warmth and loveliness she never forgot to treasure.

Tutu never worked outside the home once she was married. She had no role 
to play in the larger society, the way Jane Addams and Mother Jones did. But 
like them, she was all that one could ask in a mother, and I am grateful she 
was mine.

Three very different mothers, but all attesting to certain qualities that define 
what being a mother is.

One of these qualities is care and nurture, a spiritual quality, an attitude, a way 
of being that reaches out to protect and support and help bring to maturity or 
back to health or to a full enjoyment of human rights.

A second quality is the willingness to get your hands dirty—as Mother Jones 
did by going to jail, by sleeping in shacks and on the ground, by being never 
afraid to face down wicked men; as Jane Addams did by tending sick 
children and by picking up garbage and by entering the fray of corrupt 
politics to clean it up; as Tutu did by giving birth and doing our dirty laundry 
and cleaning up the mess that sickness can cause.

Thirdly, each of these women possessed the quality of always being there, of 
a presence that one knew could be counted on, of not having only certain 
hours when they would do the work but doing the work whatever it was 
when the work needed to be done; often it is not that such people of 
authority have to do anything, but knowing that they will at a moment’s 
notice is a comfort and a blessing.

May these brief stories of  three mothers inspire each person to remember 
and be grateful for some mother who has been a vital part of your life. If they 
are still living, and you have not done so, why not let them know you are 
grateful.


                               

                                            BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.	Jean Bethke Elshtain, JANE ADDAMS AND THE DREAM OF 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: A LIFE, Basic Books, 2002.

     2. Elliott J. Gorn, MOTHER JONES: THE MOST DANGEROUS  
         WOMAN IN AMERICA, Hill and Wang, 2001.

2.	Louis Menand, THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, Farrar, Straus and 
Girous, 2001, pages 306-316.                                        




Copyright 2005, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved