We enjoy thanking our mothers on their special day, showering them with chocolates, flowers and brunch: Mother’s Day has been popular since Anna Jarvis persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to establish it in the U.S. in 1914. On that second Sunday in May we can celebrate more than our own mothers however; we can give thought to all the women whose mothering has benefited humanity as a whole.
Many highly accomplished people have revealed how the support of a gifted mother enabled their success, whether in arts, science, invention, literary works or in founding global organizations which benefit us all.
Primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall for instance has often shared how crucial her mother’s support has been for her life’s work. Goodall single-handedly created new methods in primate study, and she still in her 80’s travels the world promoting her conservation and wildlife foundations. When Jane was a child her mother encouraged her studious natural history interests, making space at home for live animal specimens and later even accompanying Jane to Africa where she could not otherwise have gone as a lone female student-researcher hired in 1960 by anthropologist Louis Leakey.
That mother changed the word not only for Jane, but for all of us – including a great many chimpanzees.
Over a century earlier, Ava King-Noel Lovelace’s mother made sure her daughter had an education in sciences and languages, which led to Ava’s ability to envision — and with Charles Babbage create — the “analytical engine”, the predecessor of the computer. Ava’s father was the poet Lord Byron, and her mother (separated from Byron a month after Ada’s birth) did not want her daughter falling into what she evidently considered the fantasizing wastrel lifestyle of a poet. The result has affected us all, in view of Ava’s work toward developing the technology which now runs our media and economies.
Another genius in the world of science, Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction techniques made it possible to unravel the structure of the DNA molecule, was the academically gifted child of a family of British intellectuals and public figures. Her mother, Muriel Frances Waley, not only enabled her brilliant daughter’s education and career but also helped save the lives of thousands of other children through the Kinderstransport effort. This organization brought some 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany to Britain throughout 1938 to 1940.
Here in Canada, two immigrant British writers who vividly described how early farms and towns were wrestled out of the Canadian wilderness, were educated at home by a broad-minded mother. Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill (born 1803 and 1802, authors of Roughing It in the Bush, and Studies of Plant Life in Canada, among many other titles) were home-schooled in England by both mother (Elizabeth Homer Strickland) and father, who inculcated a love of literature, rational inquiry and what we now call “social justice” in their eight children.
Thomas Strickland died in 1818 leaving his widow with a house but little income, at which point the offspring, still in their teens, began writing books and articles for profit. Agnes and Elizabeth produced a best-selling history series (Lives of the Queens of England, 1840-48), and brother Samuel, who preceded Susanna and Catharine in their move to Canada, was a farmer, businessman, civic leader and author of another historical autobiography: Twenty-seven Years in Canada West
1853; 1970. Elizabeth Homer had well equipped her children to show Canadians how their nation emerged from its own childhood.
A mother and mother-in-law pair together were responsible for England’s world-famous Kew Gardens. Augusta, mother of King George III, carried on the work at Kew and neighbouring Richmond Estates begun by George’s grandmother Queen Caroline. These mothers’ legacy was not merely in continuing a line of royal figures; it included an internationally famous plant collection of 50,000 species, plus the Millennium Seed Bank which since 2001 has conserved seeds for the whole world.
These are a few mothers whose legacy is their famous children, but how many more mothers’ stories and influence are lost to history? What do we know about the mothers of Socrates, Shakespeare and the Dalai Lama? Of the mystics Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich (herself called “Mother Juliana” by pilgrims to her shrine)? We know only that these mothers launched brilliant offspring who changed the world forever.
Maybe every town should have a Tomb of the Unknown Mother on which people could heap flowers annually on Mother’s Day: bouquets of Helichrysum (everlasting aster) and Sempervivem (always-living) seem appropriate.
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S. B. Julian, BA, MLS, writes books, articles and plays in Victoria. One recent title is Women Who Made the World — a short survey with bio-sketches of notable women throughout history.