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| Mother's Day |
History
Celebrations go back to ancient times when Greeks and Romans held festivals in honor of the mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele. However, the early Christian festival known as “Mothering Sunday stands as the modern precursor. This European tradition fell on the fourth Sunday in Lent. Many believed the faithful would return on this day to their “mother church”— the main church near their home — for a special service. The Mothering Sunday tradition shifted over time into a more secular holiday where children would give their mothers flowers and other gifts. This custom would blend into the American Mother’s Day in the 1930s and 1940s.
American author and poet Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,”became the editor of Woman’s Journal, a widely-read suffragist magazine, in 1872. During that time, she wrote an “Appeal to womanhood throughout the world,” which would become known as the Mother’s Day Proclamation. The document asked women to fight for world peace following both the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. Howe then launched a failed attempted to start a “Mother’s Day” celebration on June 2. Two decades later Howe suggested a Mother’s Day celebration every July 4. This also failed to take hold, but set the stage for a future attempt.
Anna Jarvis successfully initiated Mother’s Day after her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died in 1905. Jarvis noted that Mother’s Day should contain a “singular possessive,” (hence the apostrophe) so each family might honor its own mother — as opposed to all mothers. Jarvis, who neither married nor had children, organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration in May 1908. A Philadelphia department store owner named John Wanamaker lent his financial support to the cause. That same month thousands of people attended a Mother’s Day event at one of Wanamaker’s stores.
Jarvis soon lobbied to make Mother’s Day a national holiday — urging prominent Americans to join the effort. By 1912 many states, towns, and churches had adopted Mother’s Day as an annual event. Jarvis also started the Mother’s Day International Association. President Wilson would soon establish the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day in 1914. Hallmark began selling Mother’s Day cards in the early 1920s.
Jarvis’ love affair with the holiday she worked so hard to start did not last, and she eventually grew to resent its commercial appeal. As florists and greeting card companies began to cash in, she soured on the idea of a national day — urging people to stop buying flowers, cards and candies. Jarvis spent most of her personal wealth hiring attorneys to file lawsuits against groups using the term “Mother’s Day.” She even tried to persuade the federal government to remove it from the calendar.
Mother's Day Quotes
- “A mother is your first friend, your best friend, your forever friend.” —Unknown
- “When you are looking at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.” —Charley Benetto
- “Mother is the heartbeat in the home; and without her, there seems to be no heartthrob.” —Leroy Brownlow
- “Mothers are like glue. Even when you can’t see them, they’re still holding the family together.” —Susan Gale
- “My Mother: She is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her. ” —Jodi Picoult
- “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.” —William Makepeace Thackeray
- “The influence of a mother in the lives of her children is beyond calculation.” —James E. Faust
- “It may be possible to gild pure gold, but who can make his mother more beautiful?” —Mahatma Gandhi
- “There is no role in life that is more essential than that of motherhood.” —Elder M. Russell Ballard
- “Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes
- “Motherhood is the exquisite inconvenience of being another person’s everything.” —Unknown
- “Only mothers can think of the future because they give birth to it in their children.” —Maxim Grosky
- “My mother was my role model before I even knew what that word was.” —Lisa Leslie
- “To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.” —Maya Angelou
- “Motherhood is the biggest gamble in the world. It is the glorious life force. It’s huge and scary – it’s an act of infinite optimism.” —Gilda Radner
