Mother’s Day started as a way for women to change the world and became much less
By Carolyn Colesworthy

Before Woodrow Wilson dulled its keen sensibilities, and way before it helped pay for a new addition on Hallmark’s house, Mother’s Day in the United States was about peace—not the buying of expensive bath soaps. It began in 1870 as a women’s response to the atrocities of the Civil War, when social activist Julia Ward Howe wrote a Mother’s Day Proclamation—as a call for peace and disarmament. Hereﾕs a sample:

“From the voice of a devastated Earth, a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: ‘Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.’
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace . . . “

Howe was inspired by the young Appalachian homemaker Ann Jarvis, who in 1858—two years before the Civil War—began organizing women for what she called Mothers’ Work Days, when women would gather to work on sanitation projects to protect their family’s health. This was no small contribution in the years when we still burned our trash. Later, Jarvis’s Days morphed into efforts to reconcile neighbors who were fighting opposite sides of the Civil War—still nothing like getting an iTunes gift card and breakfast in bed.

The first nationally recognized Mother’s Day in the U.S.—and perhaps the origin of its slide into mediocrity—was in 1914, when Wilson asked the country to put up flags to honor the mothers of fallen sons. That was the year World War I began in Europe.
It sounds like a good idea—but it’s not exactly the type of introspection Howe intended. She wanted men to disarm and women to join each other in figuring out a way to live in peace. What she got was a day of flag-waving and, later, a florist’s Christmas in May. No sort of honor can replace a child. Howe seems to have known this. Wilson, apparently, did not.