Mother's Day

I often wonder how many people know the history behind holidays we celebrate and love.  For many Mother's Day is seen as a positive holiday for most to honor and treat their mother.  For other's it can be a bit somber in remembering a mother who has passed on.  For most this is all they know of Mother's Day but there's actually so much more to it.

The story of Mother's Day begins in the 1850s when a women's organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis from West Virginia held Mother's Day work clubs to help decrease infant mortality rates and improve sanitary conditions, fighting disease, stopping milk contamination.

These groups of women also cared for wounded soldiers from both sides during the Civil War.  After the war the women organized Mother's Friendship Day picnics to help unite former foes. In 1870, the same year Julia Ward Howe (the composer of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"_ read a Mother's Day Proclamation asking all women to take a more active political role encouraging peace.  Around the same time Jarvis had started a Mother's Friendship Day for both Union and Confederates across her state.

Ann's daughter Anna is however the one responsible for what we call Mother's Day now.  Anna Jarvis never had children of her own but the death of her own mother in 1905 inspired her to organize the very first Mother's Day observances in 1908.

On May 10, 1908 families gathered in her hometown of Grafton, West Virginia as well as in Philadelphia where Jarvis lived at that time and in several other cities as well.  Through Jarvis's efforts Mother's Day was soon observed in many states and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson officially set aside the second Sunday in May for Mother's Day.

Jarvis was very much against the commercialism of Mother's Day.  "For Jarvis it was a day where you'd go home and spend time with your mother and thank her for all that she did."  - West Virginia Wesleyan's Antonlini who wrote "Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Defense of ther Mother's Day."

Jarvis's dislike of the commercialism of the holiday lead her to organize boycotts, threaten lawsuits, and she even attacked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt because she raised funds for charities on Mother's Day.  In 1923 she crashed a confectioners convention in Philadelphia.  Two years later she lead a protest crashing the 1925 convention of the The American War Mothers who used Mother's Day to sell carnations every year.





Sources:

• http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140508-mothers-day-nation-gifts-facts-culture-moms/
• http://time.com/3850695/mothers-day-2015-origins/
• http://www.scribd.com/doc/264676899/Mother-s-Day-Proclamation