ABSTRACT

In today’s Western vocabulary, the word martyr often has negative connotations, meaning someone who sacrifices their own needs excessively in support of another. (Notice that this usage has nothing to do with dying for one’s faith.) Thus, in common usage, one person will tell another, “Don’t be a martyr.” An additional complexity of this usage is that it is often attributed to women, and particularly mothers. In our role as mothers, each of us struggles to walk the fine line between being a good mother and oversacrificing ourselves and becoming a “martyr.” Was this struggle always so? In fact, there was a time when mothers were not martyrs.