Quiet Mountain Essays
Copyright© ,2005
Conceiving Mother's Day
by
Katarina Tepesh
On the second Sunday in May, many families and churches make a special point of honoring
mothers, hoping that Mother's Day will increase respect for parents and strengthen family bonds.
Historians claim that the holiday of Mother's Day emerged from the ancient festival dedicated to
mother goddess. In Rome, too, a mother Goddess was worshipped as early as 250 BC. There are
reasons to believe that the term "Mother Church" was a substitution for "Mother Goddess" in the
times of the early church, and some say the ceremonies honoring Roman Goddesses were adopted by
the early church to venerate the Mother of Christ, Mother Mary.
In the sixteenth century, people brought gifts to their mothers on Mothering Sunday, as it was called
then. Typical gifts were cakes and little mementos.
The Origin of Mother's Day in the United States
The first mention of the idea of Mother's Day can be traced to Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), who
suggested it in 1872. Howe, who wrote the famous words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, saw
Mother's Day as being dedicated to peace. She organized Mother's Day meetings in Boston,
Massachusetts every year.
An American writer, lecturer, and reformer, Ms. Howe was one of the most famous women of her
time. She was born in New York City into a prominent family and married American social reformer
Samuel Gridley Howe in 1843. They moved to Boston, where she wrote poems and plays and helped
her husband edit The Commonwealth, an antislavery paper.
In 1861, during the Civil War, Howe visited military camps near Washington, D.C. There she was
inspired to write "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to be sung to the tune of the popular American
song "John Brown's Body." It was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 and soon appeared in all
the Union army hymnbooks. After the war, Howe became increasingly interested in the women's
movement. In 1868, she helped organize the New England Women's Club and served for many
years as its president. Howe also became the first president of the New England Women Suffrage
Association.
Howe's writings include A Trip to Cuba (1860), Sex and Education (1874), Modern Society (1881),
Margaret Fuller (1883), and Reminiscences (1899). In 1908, she became the first woman elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia is credited with bringing about the official observance of Mother's Day.
Her campaign to establish such a holiday began as a remembrance of her mother, who died in 1905
and who had, in the late 19th century, tried to establish "Mother's Friendship Days" as a way to heal
the scars of the Civil War.
For the first official Mother's Day service in 1908, Anna Jarvis sent 500 white carnations to the church
to be given to the participating mothers. During the next several years, she sent more than 10,000
carnations there. Carnations - red for the living and white for the deceased - became symbols of the
purity, strength and endurance of motherhood.
In her campaign to have Mother's Day recognized as a national holiday, Jarvis called on clergymen,
business leaders and politicians for help.
In 1914, the U.S. House and Senate approved a resolution proclaiming the second Sunday of May as
Mother's Day. President Woodrow Wilson endorsed it and issued the first Mother's Day
proclamation, stating that the observance serves as a "public expression of our love and reverence for
the mothers of our country." (This was more of a political statement than an explanation of the
holiday, but it made it official!)
Jarvis' accomplishment soon turned bitter for her. Enraged by the commercialization of the holiday,
she filed a lawsuit to stop a 1923 Mother's Day festival and was even arrested for disturbing the peace
at a war mothers' convention where women sold white carnations - Jarvis' symbol for mothers - to
raise money. "This is not what I intended," Jarvis said. "I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not
profit."
When she died in 1948, in a Pennsylvania sanatorium at age 84, Jarvis had become a woman of great
ironies. Never a mother herself, and her maternal fortune dissipated by her efforts to stop the
commercialization of the holiday she had founded, Jarvis told a reporter shortly before her death that
she was sorry she had ever started Mother's Day. She spoke these words in a nursing home where
every Mother's Day her room had been filled with cards from all over the world. On the day of the
funeral, the bell on Andrews Church in Grafton tolled 84 times in her honor.
Contributor's Notes...
Ms. Tepesh lived in Croatia, before moving to New York. A member of the Gotham Writer's group, Ms. Tepesh
is a frequent contributor to QME. She has published work in magazines such as Caprice and American Home.
