The Real History of Mother's Day

May 9th marks Mother’s Day here in the US, which was made a National Holiday by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. Depending on one’s preferences, 1914 would place this within the Diesel Era source material for Dieselpunk. However, how and why the history of Mother’s Day became a national holiday in 1914 is different from what is portrayed in most sources. Here’s an excerpt from a fascinating article in the Washington Post. 

Anna Howard Shaw

 

That spring, suffrage leader Anna Howard Shaw lobbied President Woodrow Wilson to declare the first Saturday in May Women’s Independence Day “in recognition of the right and necessity that the women of the United States should become citizens in fact as well as in name.” Ruth Hanna McCormick, the Illinois suffragist later elected to Congress, then organized women across America to participate in the first Women’s Independence Day on May 2, 1914. Women in every state gathered to read a woman’s version of the Declaration of Independence and demand the vote.

Wilson did not yet support the federal suffrage amendment. He also didn’t want to meet with any pesky suffragists and ignored Shaw’s request. Instead, he proclaimed that henceforth the second Sunday in May would be Mother’s Day, reminding the nation of women’s primary role in American life. Wilson decreed that American flags should be flown at all government buildings and at private homes “as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.”

Wilson’s Mother’s Day proclamation disappointed women’s rights advocates as well as the women who had organized state and local Mother’s Day events since the 1870s. These early Mother’s Day events were never about empty praise of mothers, as Wilson imagined. Rather, they were opportunities for women to shape political debates, enact changes to policies affecting women and children and provide community support for mothers.

For example, in the years following the Civil War, abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” began organizing mothers’ peace events, which provide one origin story for Mother’s Day. Having seen the ravages of war (and especially the deaths of so many sons) as a Civil War volunteer, she became a lifelong advocate for peace, using her position as a mother to propel pacifism. Howe organized the first Mother’s Peace Day in 1872, and this event was celebrated in cities across the nation for 30 years.

Anna Jarvis and her mother Ann provided another Mother’s Day origin story. Anna Jarvis grew up in West Virginia where she helped her mother (a woman who bore 13 children and watched nine die) organize Mother’s Day Work Clubs to combat the Appalachian region’s high infant mortality rate with improvements to sanitation and health care. After her mother’s death in 1905, Jarvis committed herself to securing a Mother’s Day holiday as a way to honor her beloved mother and, by extension, all mothers.

But shortly after Wilson declared Mother’s Day a federal holiday in 1914, women like Jarvis became disillusioned with the frivolous commercialization of what to her should have been a sacred and sincere commemoration. Indeed, in 1933, Jarvis even wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking him to remove the federal mandate for Mother’s Day.

Why? Because instead of equality, health care, peace, safety and support, Mother’s Day had become an occasion for vapid expressions of “love and reverence,” increasingly characterized by flowers, brunch and store-bought cards.

More significantly, Jarvis’s opposition signaled that celebrating motherhood had become symbolic, not substantive. One could even argue that Mother’s Day provided a superficial placeholder in lieu of policies that actually would benefit mothers. Just months after the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act, a longtime goal of women activists. This landmark legislation funded maternal and infant health-care centers, supported prenatal care and education and significantly reduced infant mortality, especially in rural areas. But the Sheppard-Towner provisions expired in 1929 in the face of increasingly vocal opposition grounded in fears of “communist” child-rearing and the dissolution of the patriarchal family.

Congress next approved major legislation benefiting mothers in the 1940s. For four years during World War II, the United States funded child-care centers across the country, under the Lanham Act, enabling mothers to enter the labor force while husbands fought the war. But, after the war concluded, so too did the program. Like women’s wartime labor, this program succeeded only to the extent to which it was understood to be temporary. Women took to the streets to protest the removal of funding for child-care centers, and federally supported child care has remained a core goal of women activists ever since.

Read the full article here.