May 13, 2007 - 09:37:48 CDT
The beginning attempts at getting a Mother’s Day started in America were failures.That’s probably because Hallmark and the florists’ network weren’t the instigators. No, Mother’s Day was not a conspiracy of merchants, recognizing they probably could have made it a commercial success from the start.
Mother’s Day for Peace was born in 1870, coming from the fertile mind and spirit of Julia Ward Howe. Best known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” she was not a devotee of war. Hers was a hymn to social righteousness. Julia Ward Howe worked with widows and orphans of both Union and Confederate Civil War soldiers. When she saw another war erupting, the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, she issued a declaration to women of all nations to arise and oppose war.
Mothers yearn for a time when their children don’t fight and die, Howe wrote.
Her campaign didn’t catch on.
Likewise, Anna Reeves Jarvis, of West Virginia, tried to galvanize women, mothers in particular, to promote sanitary conditions for wounded Civil War soldiers of both sides. Her cause was to reconcile her neighbors, mothers of combatants who fought each other.
The bitterness was stronger than Anna Reeves Jarvis’ Mother’s Day. The day didn’t catch on.
Her daughter, also Anna, vowed to inaugurate a day to honor mothers, living and dead. In 1907, she handed out more than 500 carnations to mothers in the church where her own late mother had taught Sunday School.
The Mother’s Day that’s familiar to us got wind in its sails when, in 1908, a Philadelphia department store magnate, John Wanamaker, decided to promote it. It was not, however, until 1914 that Congress passed a resolution and President Woodrow Wilson signed it that Mother’s Day became officially recognized.
Wilson, ever the bluenose, wanted it to be known that his approval was being given to a mother’s role in the family. Gone was even the hint of women ” mothers ” embodying social conscience.
By the time the 21st century came, Mother’s Day could mean almost anything or nothing. The highest value of the holiday is when it brings people together in a spirit of appreciation and gratitude, when they know how much a particular woman ” a mother, a grandmother ” has done to enhance the lives of those she’s nurtured.
That sharing of appreciation can happen even when the mother lives in memory.
True, there can be melancholy on the day for some, including the childless not by choice.
There are those whose mothers have not created bonds of love but have hurt their children by their heartless abuse. It’s appropriately hard to find a Hallmark card with a greeting for a bad mother.
Those of us with wonderful mothers shouldn’t take that for granted.
Perhaps today, special good wishes should be directed to American mothers who are in Afghanistan or Iraq or other military duty stations.
A wonderful sentiment comes from the Jewish tradition, quoted in “an Ode to a Capable Women”: “...her children rise up and called her blessed..."
Mother's Day wrote on May 13, 2007 11:28 AM:
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