05/10/2026
Returning Mother's Day To Its Original Meaning
by Ruth Rosen (edited)
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 the 2nd day of June. 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 Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, Anna Marie, 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.
Companies seized on the holiday by setting out to teach Americans how to honor their mothers by buying them flowers, candy, or cards. This outraged Anna Marie. When florists sold carnations for the then-exorbitant price of $1 a piece, she began a campaign against "those who would undermine Mother's Day with their greed." But she was hardly a match for the flower and card companies. Soon, the Florists' Review announced, with a certain triumphant tone, that it was "Miss Jarvis who was completely squelched." And they were right.
And so a billion-dollar industry was born.
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