May Day: Festival of the Flora or International Workers’ Day?

By Dorothy Lander

In recent years, May Day, traditionally a celebration of Flora (the Roman Goddess of Spring and Flowers), has been overshadowed as a holiday to commemorate the historic struggles and gains made by workers and the labour movement.  International Workers’ Day is observed on May 1 in many countries and as Labour Day in the United States and Canada on the first Monday of September.

How about a reflowering of May 1 that ushers in the new signs of Life and also promises workers a workday (8 hours max) that leaves time and space to dance the Maypole in both its metaphorical and literal meanings of community and Nature’s re-creation.

Botticelli’s Primavera, 1482

The dual meanings of May Day drew closely together in the life of Florence Doreen Jackson, who just happens to be Mummy to Johny-Boy, as John Graham-Pole tells in his memoir. https://tryhealingarts.ca/product/johny-boy-an-english-boy-grows-up/

Johny-Boy responds to this photo of Mummy as a 5 year old: “It captures something of her independent spirit in the odd-one-out dress, the determined pose, and the square-on stance.”

Florence Doreen before marriage and motherhood blazed paths in women’s labour for the generations that followed, including mine.  In the 1930s, just as the world was rebounding from the Great War, she earned her Master of Arts at Bedford College in London.  She went on to become the very first secretary of the London University Union, with her own offices and staff. Then, she founded London University’s first lodgings bureau for the countless thousands of young people from the world over who have since become students at the colleges that make up that university.

Fast forward to the 21^st century.  Johny-Boy marries Dorothy Lander and moves to Antigonish, Nova Scotia in 2007.  John and Dorothy marvel at the work life coincidence of Florence Doreen and Dorothy. After the student strike at St. Francis Xavier University challenging opposition to coed housing in the early 1970s—(Frank McKenna was then President of the Students’ Union)—Dorothy was the first woman manager of residences and food service at St. Francis Xavier University from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s.  The Canadian equivalent of a lodgings bureau.

John and Dorothy plan to celebrate May Day 2026, not with a garland of the traditional hawthorne blossoms, but with a garland of coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara), which is the first blooming wildflower in northern Nova Scotia. Women Workers Unite!