The Curious History of Mother's Dayexcerpted from "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the
Nostalgia Trap" by Stephanie Coontz (contributed by "Shifter the practical Cat")
The extent to which the right-wing analysis has permeated our
understanding of women's changing roles is illustrated in the ritual
lamentations we hear each year about the "debasement of Mother's Day."
Most people believe that Mother's Day was originally a time for an
intensely personal celebration of women's private roles and nuclear
family relationships. In "the old days," we brought mom breakfast in
bed to acknowledge all the meals she had made for us. We picked her a
bouquet of fresh flowers to symbolize her personal, unpaid services to
her family. "Traditional" Mother's Day images, whether on the front
of greeting cards or in the back of our minds, are always set in the
kitchen or at a child's bedside, emphasizing mother's devotion to her
own family and ignoring her broader kin networks, social ties, and
political concerns. But as domestic work has been devalued and
formerly private arenas of life drawn into the market, the story goes,
the personal element in this celebration has been lost. Mother's Day
has become just another occasion for making money -- the busiest day
of the year for American restaurants and telephone companies, the best
single week of the year for florists. So every May, between the ads
for "all-you-can-eat" Mother's Day buffets, we hear a chorus of pleas
for Americans to rediscover "the true meaning of Mother's Day." Last
year, for example, my son carried home from school (along with three
dinner coupons from local fast-food restaurants) a handout urging
children to think of some "homemade" gift or service to express their
appreciation for their mothers' "special" love. It was a nice
sentiment, and I was delighted to receive the fantasy book my child
pulled from his personal library and wrapped in a hand-drawn heart --
but the historian in me was a little bemused. The fact is that
Mother's Day originated to celebrate the organized activities of women
*outside* the home. It became trivialized and commercialized only
after it became confined to "special" nuclear family relations. The
people who inspired Mother's Day had quite a different idea about what
made mothers special. They believed that motherhood was a *political*
force. They wished to celebrate mothers' social roles as community
organizers, honoring women who acted on behalf of the entire future
generation rather than simply putting their own children first. The
first proposal of a day for mothers came from Anna Reeves Jarvis, who
in 1858 organized Mothers' work Days in West Virginia to improve
sanitation in the Appalachian Mountains. During the Civil War, her
group provided medical services for soldiers and civilians on both
sides of the conflict. After the war, Jarvis led a campaign to get
the former combatants to lay aside their animosities and forge new
social and political alliances. The other nineteenth-century precursor
of Mother's Day began in Boston in 1872, when poet and philanthropist
Julia Ward Howe proposed an annual Mothers' Day for Peace, to be held
every June 2:
Arise then, women of this day!... Say firmly: "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 women of one country will be too tender of
those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure
theirs."
Howe's Mothers' Day was celebrated widely in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
and other Eastern states until the turn of the century.
Most of these ceremonies and proposals, significantly, were couched
in the plural, not the singular, mode: Mothers' Day was originally a
vehicle for organized socail and political action by all mothers, not
for celebrating the private services of one's own particular mother.
When Anna Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, also named Anna
Jarvis, began a letter-writing campaign to have a special day set
aside for mothers. But by this period, there was already
considerable pressure to sever the personal meaning of motherhood
from its earlier political associations. The mobilization of women
as community organizers was the last thing on the minds of the
prominent merchants, racist politicians, and antisuffragist activists
who, sometimes to Jarvis's dismay, quickly jumped on the bandwagon.
In fact, the adoption of Mother's Day by the 63rd Congress on May 8,
1914 represented a reversal of everything the nineteenth-century
mothers' days had stood for. The speeches proclaiming Mother's Day
in 1914 linked it to celebration of home life and privacy; they
repudiated women's social role beyond the household. One
antisuffragist leader inverted the original intent entirely when she
used the new Mother's Day as an occasion to ask rhetorically: If a
woman becomes "a mother to the Municipality, who is going to mother
us?" Politicians found that the day provided as many opportunities
for self-promotion as did the Fourth of July. Merchants hung
testimonials to their own mothers above the wares they hoped to
convince customers to buy for other mothers. A day that had once
been linked to controversial causes was reduced to an occasion for
platitudes and sales pitches. Its bond with social reform movements
broken, Mother's Day immediately drifted into the orbit of the
marketing industry. The young Jarvis had proposed that inexpensive
carnations be worn to honor one's mother. Outraged when the flowers
began to sell for a dollar apiece, she attacked the florists as
"profiteers" and began a campaign to protect Mother's Day from such
exploitation. In 1923, she managed to get a political and commercial
celebration of Mother's Day cancelled in New York (on grounds,
ironically, of infringement of copyright), but this was her last
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victory. Jarvis spent the rest of her life trying to regain control
of the day, becoming more and more paranoid about those who "would
undermine [Mother's Day] with their greed." She was eventually
committed to a sanitarium, where she died in 1948.
Coontz also notes: "For all its repressiveness, the
early-nineteenth-century definition of woman's sphere had given her moral
responsibility beyond the household, a duty that shaded easily into social
activism. Women who participated in antislavery agitation, temperance,
and welfare reform saw this work as essentially maternal in nature. Thus
the earliest proponents of honoring motherhood were people allied with
such social reform movements."
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