The women who originally celebrated Mother’s Day conceived of it as an occasion to use their status as mothers to protest injustice and war. In 1858, Anna Reeves Jarvis organized Mother’s Work Days in West Appalachian communities to protest the lack of sanitation that caused disease-bearing insects and polluted water to sicken or even kill poor workers. In 1870, after witnessing the bloody Civil War, Julia Ward Howe–a Boston pacifist, poet, and suffragist who wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”–proclaimed a special day for mothers to oppose war. Committed to ending all armed conflict, 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.”
For the next three decades, Americans celebrated Mother’s Days for Peace on June 2. Women political activists of this era fought to end lynching and organized to end child labor, trafficking of women, and consumer fraud. In their view, their moral superiority was grounded in the fact of their motherhood.
When Anna Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, also named Anna, vowed to honor her mother’s political activism by creating a national Mother’s Day. The gift card and flower industries also lobbied hard. As an industry publication, the Florists’ Review, put it, “This was a holiday that could be exploited.” In 1914, Congress responded and proclaimed the second Sunday in May to be Mother’s Day.
If you choose to ignore this, you can still put your mom’s name in a fake news reel or outsource your annual call to your mother. It’s also worth checking out Postcards From Yo Momma for the occasion.