Warning for our readers: This article treats sensitive issues including abortion and political violence.
When in graduate school studying women in ancient Judaism and early Christianity, I became a mother. This experience led me to focus my studies on motherhood in Jewish and Christian antiquity. While I was reading about ancient mothers, I was also learning how to be a mother myself. I dealt with this transition in true academic fashion: by reading a lot about motherhood. And I noticed something strange. All of the modern parenting books assumed that being a mother meant sacrificing for your child: sacrificing sleep, sacrificing your own needs and well-being, sacrificing your cleaning standards, and maybe sacrificing your career. Modern people seem to somehow know that being a good mother means being self-sacrificing. If you’ve ever read a mommy blog, you already know this. None of this is news to modern readers.
But ancient writers did not assume that motherhood and sacrifice go together at all. The elite materfamilias is typically described as formidable, severe, and involved in her adult children’s lives.[1] Ancient ideals about motherhood, so different from our contemporary ones, caused me to question where we get our ideas about “normal” and “natural” family relations. We may assume that a mother’s relationship with her young child must be tender, close, and doting, but that was not the assumption in the ancient Greco-Roman world. I wanted to know: where did this connection between motherhood and self-sacrifice begin? Why does it persist?
Angelica Kaufman, “Cornelia, Mütter der Gracchen” (1785); Oil on canvas (Wikimedia Commons).
My book is about this question: why tie mothers so easily and naturally to notions of self-sacrifice? Why assume that mothers will resemble the martyrs? It investigates this question in the realm of early Jewish and Christian history which, I suggest, is at least one place where this theme was gestated. Specifically, I explore four ancient Jewish and Christian textual sites where motherhood is tied to self-sacrifice: Mary the mother of Jesus in the canonical gospels, the women in the Book of Revelation, the mother with seven sons in 2 and 4 Maccabees, and the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. I argue that the image of a mother who painfully produces a child was a useful rhetorical device in ancient Jewish and Christian texts as communities worked to distinguish themselves from other traditions in the larger Greco-Roman world and, eventually, from each other. A maternal figure proved particularly useful for explaining painful, difficult origins.
In each chapter, I juxtapose the ancient maternal figure with a modern example of maternal activism. Maternal activists illuminate something new in these ancient stories about mothers and sacrifice. Rather than assuming that good mothers sacrifice on behalf of their children and bad mothers sacrifice their children, maternal activists help us see the ways that maternal self-sacrifice can be viewed in a variety of different ways and can be used for a variety of different causes. Likewise, maternal activists remind us that a mother is more than simply a mother; in Mary Hunt’s words, “women are fully human agents of social and political change sometimes using their own lives as collateral.”
In my book, I consider recent examples of women from the United States, Latin America, Russia, and the Middle East, all of whom strategically deploy their motherhood for various activist goals. Mary appears alongside the madres de Plaza de Mayo from Argentina, the women of the book of Revelation flank women combatants from the Salvadoran civil war, the Maccabean mother who encourages her seven sons is juxtaposed with women suicide bombers in Israel and Palestine, and Perpetua and Felicitas are considered alongside the women of Pussy Riot, activists in contemporary Russia. These juxtapositions are not intended as straightforward comparisons. Instead, they highlight how to understand maternal self-sacrifice as strategic, politically charged, and rhetorically flexible. These contemporary examples thus help us appreciate the complexity of the ancient texts at the center of my book, undermining the assumption that maternal self-sacrifice is monolithic and can bear only one meaning.
The symbol of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Madres de Plaza de Mayo) found in Buenos Aires, Argentina (Wikimedia Commons).
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To demonstrate how this analysis works, I’ll explain how I juxtaposed Mary and the madres de Plaza de Mayo. Mary of Nazareth often appears as the paradigmatic self-sacrificing mother. Interpreters typically focus on a few key moments in the canonical gospels to highlight her self-sacrifice: in particular, her willingness to accept an unplanned pregnancy (see Luke 1 and, to a certain extent, Matthew 1) and her presence at the crucifixion of her child (in John 19 especially). Of these, the infancy narratives often figure most prominently in discussions of her sacrifice and this is especially true as it relates to contemporary debates about abortion. To consider just one example, the Catholic organization Priests for Life discusses Mary this way:
Mary faces an unplanned pregnancy. Her response is Let it be done to me according to your word [Luke 1:38]. She freely chooses to accept the Child, and in doing so, acknowledges the primacy of the word. In other words, the truth of God's Word exists before her own choosing. . . . In the pro-life mentality, . . . the choice of the mother must respect the truth of the inherent value of the child, which does not in any way flow from or depend upon us. Let it be done to me according to your word. As we submit to that truth, God does not rob us of our freedom. Instead, He lifts it up to Himself.[2]
The author of this description of Mary is Father Frank Pavone, a priest who placed the remains of what he claimed was an aborted fetus on the altar while celebrating Mass just days before the November 2016 election, in an effort to encourage congregants to vote for Donald Trump. Marian rhetoric of sacrifice can be put to use in a variety of ways.
Using the experiences of the madres de Plaza de Mayo, we might see Mary differently. During Argentina’s Dirty War (1977-1983), government death squads “disappeared” as many as 30,000 activists, students, and other “subversives.” To protest this state terrorism, a group of mothers of these desaparecidos held weekly public demonstrations in a central city square of Buenos Aires. The madres de Plaza de Mayo, as they came to be known, invoked the image of Mary as a suffering and sacrificing mother. One madre says, they “remember the sacrifice of Christ, nailed to the cross . . . we also have our Christ and we relive the pain of Mary, but we are not even allowed to try to console him with our presence.” The madres often hold Mary as an ideal of maternal strength, devotion, and love; yet their references to Mary strategically indict the government as the cause of their suffering. Although the madres ostensibly present a traditional image of Mary suffering at her son’s crucifixion, the response of clergy and junta officials shows the power of their creative critique. An army captain disparaged their activism, saying, “The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo pervert the role of the mother. . . . I can’t imagine the Virgin Mary shouting, protesting, spreading hatred when her son, our God, was snatched from her arms.” Certain madres were imprisoned and forced to pray the Hail Mary prayer, as if doing so would remind them of their traditional role as mothers. Though the madres insisted that their use of Mary is not transgressive, these responses that seek to domesticate them show how effectively and creatively they deploy certain aspects of Mary’s image in order to publicly perform a socially and politically reformed vision of motherhood.
Juxtaposing the image of Mary from the gospels with the madres shows the complexity of discourses of maternal self-sacrifice. Mary emerges not as “the pure, self-sacrificing, humble handmaiden of the Lord and patient mother full of sorrows,” but as a mother protesting the unjust death of her child. Instead of seeing maternal self-sacrifice as either an ideal comportment for all women or an anti-feminist stance, the madres experiences give us a new possibility. Indeed, Mary can be seen alongside other mourning mothers, longing for justice. The other mothers considered in this book are likewise flexible in their possible meanings and remind us that discourses of maternal self-sacrifice do complex work for a variety of different causes.
[1] See, inter alia, Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Mother (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); and Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell, eds., Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
[2]Frank Pavone, “The Virgin Mary and Abortion,” Priests for Life, July 1, 2009, http://www.priestsforlife.org/articles/4537-the-virgin-mary-and-abortion-. Italics original.
Kathleen Gallagher Elkins, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Theology & Religious Studies at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. Mary, Mother of Martyrs: How Motherhood Became Self-Sacrifice in Early Christianity (FSR Books, 2018) is her first book. She does additional research in childhood studies, trauma theory, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.