Bread, and Roses Too
by Rebecca Brothers | 27 February 2024 |
One of my favorite podcasts is called “You’re Wrong About.” It was started by two journalists who wanted to revisit cultural moments, movements, and beliefs that we’ve collectively misremembered, misunderstood, and mischaracterized. They’ve talked about Monica Lewinsky, and Iran-Contra, and true crime, and human trafficking, and a whole bunch of other cases where our communal understanding is not as nuanced as it should be.
I love this podcast. It makes me so deliciously uncomfortable to think about how we misremember things as a society, and why we do that, and what that says about us and our priorities. And in one episode, as the hosts were discussing homelessness, one of them said something even more paradigm-shifting for me.
She said that everyone deserves a place to live that is safe and affordable and comfortable.
Safe, I already agreed with. Affordable, I was already on board.
But comfortable! That was a new thought. It felt revolutionary to realize. Of course everyone deserves comfort. Of course everyone deserves a mattress that doesn’t make their back hurt. Of course everyone deserves shoes that fit well and keep their feet dry.
“Bread for All, and Roses, too.”
In September 1911, a woman named Helen M. Todd wrote in The American Magazine about her travels with fellow women’s suffrage activists the previous summer, going from town to town to drum up support for their movement. After one rally, Todd stayed at the home of an elderly woman who wasn’t able to attend. The woman explained that
“Daughter Lucy and the hired girl couldn’t both go and leave me alone, since I have had my stroke. Lucy, she was born and brought up to woman’s rights, bein’ my daughter; but our hired girl’s new in our family and she’s real ignorant about it. So Lucy she felt it was her duty to send our girl to get converted.”
Todd continues,
“We had breakfast next morning at the usual hour of 6 A.M., in the old farm kitchen with its big black cook stove, its centerpiece of the lady slipper flowers on the table, and its back door opening on a yard full of hollyhocks. Maggie [the hired girl] ate with us. ‘If you want to know what I liked the best of all in the whole meetin’,’ she said, ‘it was that about the women votin’ so’s everybody would have bread and flowers too.’ ‘Now, that’s what mother took a fancy to,’ said my hostess. ‘Mother’s close on to ninety-two come next birthday, and I thought I would make her a birthday present of a sofa pillow with votes for women embroidered on it, but she took such a fancy to this ‘Bread and Flowers’ idea that I’m going to ask you to do me the favor to step into Marshall Field’s and get that motto stamped on a pillow and send it to me.'”
[…]
“I saw that Mother Jones’ pillow was sent to her with the inscription, ‘Bread for all, and Roses too.’ […] [Woman’s] vote will go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.
“There will be no prisons, no scaffolds, no children in factories, no girls driven on the street to earn their bread, in the day when there shall be ‘Bread for all, and Roses too.'”
Todd kept this slogan in many of her speeches going forward, and at women’s suffrage rallies, banners began to appear with the slogan on them. Poet James Oppenheim wrote an ode entitled “Bread for All,” and other activists took up the cry in their own speeches. Eventually musician Caroline Kohlsaat set Oppenheim’s poem to music, and it has been performed, with variations. by Judy Collins, John Denver, and many others.
Not in the past
It is, dare I say, as revolutionary a concept in 2024 as it was in 1911: that all of humankind deserves not just home, shelter, and security, but also music, education, nature, and books. It is both sad and provoking to think that a call for abolishing prisons and child labor is somehow just as radical in 2024 as it was in Helen Todd’s era.
But here’s something that gives me hope:
In 2022, one of my favorite writers, D.L. Mayfield, released a new book: Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times. Dorothy Day helped establish the Catholic Worker Movement in the 1930s, and she once said, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” And this: “If you have two coats, you have stolen one from the poor.” And also this: “The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”
I count Dorothy Day as more than a social reformer. I count her as a prophet, because to my way of thinking, if you say things that make me wince and then ask better questions, you are a prophet. You don’t have to be well turned out or well behaved. In fact, I’d prefer it if you weren’t. I like my prophets angry and tired and outspoken, in outfits that don’t match, with at least one indelible vice—smoking, maybe, or a temper, or a habit of procrastination so extreme it worries your loved ones.
The poet Richard Wilbur wrote something that I think Dorothy would agree with. He wrote a title to a poem: “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.”
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: Love does call us to the things of this world. Love calls us to the banal, the difficult, the heartbreaking. Love calls us to ask and answer humbling questions:
Do you have food for the week?
Is your home warm enough?
What do you need to hear today?
Do you need advice about this, or just a listening ear?
Recently a woman I know on Twitter decided she needed to check her twelve-year-old son into the psychiatric ward of her local children’s hospital. “This is the hardest thing I have ever done,” she wrote. “Admitting I can’t keep him safe at home is the second.” I am thinking of all the people chiming in below her post, encouraging her with stories of their own children and their own parents. I am thinking of the doctors and nurses and techs who will care for her son. I am thinking of their fatigue, their stress, their own parents and children whose care they take on after they leave the hospital for the day.
There is so much work to do, and some days the tasks seem so small that it feels like they can’t possibly be making a difference. Other days, the tasks seem so insurmountable that I can’t imagine the world that lies beyond them.
In his poem “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden described how his father rose early “in the blueblack cold” to stoke the fires “with cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather.”
“What did I know, what did I know,” he lamented, “of love’s austere and lonely offices?”
What do we know?
What do we know?
We know a great deal, I think. We know more than we credit ourselves for sometimes.
We know to offer respite to our friend whose mother has dementia—to offer to sit with the mother and sing old hymns to her while our friend takes a break to shower.
We know how to hold the hands of a friend in pain. We know how to hold their hair while they vomit from grief and stress, and get them a glass of water afterward. We know how to call a funeral home and admit that we are doing this for our friend and neither of us knows what to do, so please help, please tell us what to do.
We know the best casserole recipes for the friends who have had surgery—the recipes with cream of chicken soup and so, so, so much cheese.
So we sit with grief, and we bring casseroles, and we make phone calls and shop for groceries and write encouragement. We fight for the bread; we never give up on the roses. We ask the hard questions. We build the fires in the blueblack cold. And we pray that somehow, like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, it will be enough.
