Monthly Archive for May, 2006

Thanks to Nick Lyons for passing this on to me.

Excerpts from The Motherhood Manifesto:

Mother’s Day began as a day to commemorate women’s public activism, not as the celebration of one individual mother’s devotion to her own family.

In 1858, Anna Reeve Jarvis organized Mother’s Work Days in West Virginia. Her immediate goal was to improve sanitation in Appalachian communities. Later, in 1872, Julia Ward Howe—author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—promoted an annual “Mothers’ Day for Peace.” Devoted to abolishing all wars, Howe wrote: “Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage. … Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

Unfortunately, she turned out to be wrong.

For the next 30 years, Americans celebrated Mother’s Day for Peace on June 2. To women activists, the connection between motherhood and the struggle for social and economic justice seemed self-evident. These were middle-class women reformers who had fought to end slavery, launched campaigns against lynching, exposed consumer fraud, fought for suffrage and improved working conditions for women workers, ended child labor, demanded clean food and drugs and insisted upon social welfare assistance to the poor.

In 1907, Anna Jarvis, daughter of the original Virginia organizer decided to campaign for a national Mother’s Day. By then, America was well on its way to becoming a consumer society. Politicians and businessmen eagerly embraced the idea of celebrating the private sacrifices made by individual mothers. As The Florists’ Review, the industry’s trade journal, bluntly put it, “This was a holiday that could be exploited.” Heavily lobbied by the flower and card industries, Congress declared the second Sunday in May to be Mother’s Day in 1914.

The new advertising industry quickly taught Americans how to honor their mothers—by buying flowers. Outraged by florists who sold carnations for the then-exorbitant price of $1 a piece, Anna Jarvis campaigned against those who “would undermine Mother’s Day with their greed.” Naturally, she lost. Since then, Mother’s Day has ballooned into a billion-dollar holiday.

During recent decades, women activists have resurrected Mother’s Day as a holiday that celebrates women’s political engagement in society. Women have protested at nuclear test sites and have marched against gun violence. This year Codepink: Women for Peace will hold a national vigil in the nation’s capital to protest the needless deaths of American and Iraqi soldiers and civilians.

Nineteenth-century women dared to dream of a day that honored women’s commitment to peace, justice and political activism. We can do no less. We should honor their vision by committing ourselves to solving the Care Crisis and promoting the rights of working mothers.