Celebrating This Mother’s Day the Irreplaceable Role of Mothers in America

If America wants to recover its former prosperity and strength, we should start by recovering our sense of what makes moms so important.

Mother’s Day is an opportunity for Americans across the country to thank moms for the countless things they do to make our lives richer. But as Americans rush to sign cards, cook pancake breakfasts, and arrange flower bouquets for mom on Sunday, the truth is that many are falling short in articulating precisely what they’re grateful for—what makes our mothers dear to us and so essential for our flourishing.

This isn’t an accident. It is the byproduct of a long-term campaign the Left has been waging to blind us to the goodness and beauty of motherhood. Consider, for example, that the Left’s central symbol—the “Pride” flag—was invented by a member of the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” a group of drag queens who dress up as religious sisters and mock the Virgin Mary, the mother and first disciple of Jesus Christ.

Or consider that many of the policies the Left prioritizes most, from advancing radical gender ideology to defending same-sex adoption and surrogacy, treat fathers and mothers as not only indistinguishable but interchangeable.

But the roots of the Left’s campaign run much deeper than the modern LGBT movement, all the way back to Revolutionary France. Writing “Democracy in America” in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political philosopher whose grandfather was killed in the French Revolution, observed: “There are men in Europe who … claim to make the man and the woman beings, not only equal, but similar … [but] from this crude mixture of the works of nature only weak men and dishonest women can ever emerge.” 

America is different, or at least it was then. Tocqueville wrote that:

Americans do not believe that man and woman have the duty or the right to do the same things, but they show the same respect for the role of each one of them, and they consider them as beings whose value is equal, although their destinies differ. They do not give the courage of the woman the same form or the same use as that of the man; but they never doubt her courage.

Tocqueville saw the ability to recognize and cultivate the distinct strengths of women—which both the woke Left and libertarian Right fail to see today—as a crucial asset for the early American republic. It was so valuable, in fact, that Tocqueville concluded that America’s “singular prosperity and growing strength” could be principally attributed to the “superiority of their women.”

Today, if we hope to restore American greatness, as more than 80 million Americans voted to do just a few months ago, a good place to begin is by recovering and reclaiming our pride in what makes mothers and women so special. And if we want to do that, we should not only look to our political heritage but also our rich spiritual heritage in the Christian faith.

In his 1988 apostolic letter on the dignity and vocation of women, Saint Pope John Paul II wrote that a mother’s “unique contact with the life developing within her gives rise to an attitude towards human beings—not only towards her own child, but every human being—which profoundly marks the woman’s personality.”

Because of this unique gift, John Paul II believed that women would “increasingly play a part in the solution of the serious problems of the future.” And specifically, he thought:

A greater presence of women in society will prove most valuable, for it will help to manifest the contradictions present when society is organized solely according to the criteria of efficiency and productivity, and it will force systems to be redesigned in a way which favors the processes of humanization which mark the civilization of love.

Contributing to society looks different for different women, no doubt. Millions of mothers, like my own wife, stay at home, educating their children and pouring countless hours of time and energy into the life of their communities. Millions more, including my own mother, have worked full-time jobs—and sometimes a second one—to support their families and make ends meet. Both deserve praise and respect for their contributions to their families and our society.

Other women, including some of my colleagues at The Heritage Foundation, haven’t found a spouse or haven’t been able to have children but nonetheless still bring this attitude of care and openness to our work every day. They are, as Tocqueville and John Paul II would remind us, vital and unique in the gifts they offer to our workplace and society. And still other women, such as Mother Teresa and Mother Cabrini, aren’t called to the married life at all but have made immeasurable contributions to build the civilization of love and the empire of hope. As C.S. Lewis writes in “The Great Divorce,” their “motherhood” is “of a different kind.”

No matter the circumstances, however, we all benefit from the love and care of these mothers. Today, let’s thank them, and as a country let’s resolve to return to our roots and treat them with the distinction and respect that they deserve.

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