Mother’s Day is a celebration of all things maternal, a way to honor your mother for giving you the gift of life. And if you’re to believe the commercials, there’s no better way to get into the spirit of Mother’s Day than to buy her something nice — the more expensive the better.
But the spirit of Mother’s Day hasn’t always been about appreciating motherhood. Quite the opposite. It initially started out as a call to mothers to look out for their children, not the other way around, and it was much more ambitious than finding the right card — it was an attempt to bring about world peace.
The beginnings of Mother’s Day are rooted in the Civil War when a writer and abolitionist named Julia Ward Howe visited battle camps and saw, for the first time, the bloody aftermath of the war. She also worked with wartime widows and children and saw what the romanticized battles did to those who were left behind, emotionally and economically.
In 1870 with the Franco-Prussian War looming and shocked by the world’s short memory, Howe wrote a poem intended as a call to arms of sorts. What Howe, now a fully-fledged anti-war activist, wanted was to appeal to wives and mothers to stop wars before they began.
“As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil/At the summons of war,” it read, “Let women now leave all that may be left of home/For a great and earnest day of counsel.
“Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead/Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means/Whereby the great human family can live in peace…”
She was ultimately unsuccessful at her attempt to make an annual Mother’s Day for Peace formally recognized, but nearly 40 years later, Anna Jarvis, whose mother Ann had also worked with Civil War soldiers and widows, began her own crusade to recognize mothers.
Jarvis pushed hard for an official day to honor women. She wrote letters to newspapers and magazines and personally lobbied the government to create a Mother’s Day, hoping to bring womens’ achievements more to the forefront of history.
She was roundly mocked. “Absolutely absurd,” sneered Sen. Henry Moore Teller in 1908. “Puerile.”
But ultimately Jarvis was successful. Mother’s Day became part of the official calendar, to be held the second Sunday of May — not far from Julia Ward Howe’s proposed Mother’s Day for Peace date of June 2.
Howe thought that wearing a white carnation would be a beautiful symbol of the celebration of motherhood and, after President Woodrow Wilson made the day official in 1914, she worked with florists to distribute them.
The day was successful — too successful. By1920 Jarvis was so disgusted by how commercial Mother’s Day had become that she publicly broke from it, disavowed it and petitioned to get it removed from the American calendar.
She was vocal in her distaste, telling people to not buy mothers anything.
Jarvis died in 1948, embittered and broke from the many lawsuits she had brought against companies for using the phrase Mother’s Day, and the holiday lives on.
The spirit of the day has changed dramatically from how it was originally envisioned in the 1800s, and perhaps still more in the last century, so resenting its commercialization is nearly as much a tradition as actually celebrating it.
