May 14, the second Sunday in May, is a time to honor mom, overeat at lavish, expensive buffets, and spend big bucks on flowers and cards. Corporate America will make a killing on this event.
Two women instrumental in establishing Mother’s Day in America are “turning over in their graves,” as my own mom would say, because their idea of Mother’s Day was not about spending billions but more about investing in social and economic justice.
Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), remembered for writing the words to “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” suggested Mother’s Day as a day dedicated to peace after the Civil War. You remember peace, don’t you? Part of her Mother’s Day proclamation read: “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”¦/Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,/But of God.”
Howe organized a day of peace, motherhood and womanhood in 1872 that brought women together for a Festival of Peace. She was reeling from the fallout of the Civil War with widows and orphans suffering, as well as economic devastation. She helped fund the event Women for Peace and saw it a success for over ten years in Boston, as well as 18 other cities.
Before Howe planted the seeds of this Mother’s Day for Peace, Anna Reeves Jarvis organized a Mothers’ Work Day in West Virginia to improve sanitation in an Appalachian community in 1858. During the Civil War, Jarvis got women to care for the wounded on both sides. She organized meetings to persuade men to stop the hostilities.
In 1907, Jarvis’s daughter, also named Anna, began a campaign to establish a national Mother’s Day in honor of her own mother.
She started a letter-writing campaign to ministers, businessmen and politicians with the help of others. She persuaded her mother’s church in Grafton, West Virginia, to celebrate Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of May, the anniversary of her mother’s death. In 1908, Philadelphia joined in with Grafton, West Virginia. By 1911, the day was celebrated in almost every state. President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day a national holiday in 1914. His proclamation honoring mothers did not mention the pacifist roots.
Carnations were the favorite flower of Jarvis’s mother and have become the symbolic flower for Mom’s Day, with white carnations carried by those whose moms have died and pink ones for those whose moms are living. Jarvis took on the floral industry when the group saw a chance to exploit Mother’s Day. Obviously she lost and saw greed growing around this holiday. By the end of her life, she was said to be sorry that she initiated the event honoring her mother since it had lost its original meaning and become materialistic. Imagine her reaction to today’s celebrations!
Moms do deserve recognition for their contribution to the family and society. Being a mom is like being a golfer, a lot harder than it looks. In Mother School you learn the basics: love, discipline and guilt, giving and getting. As the saying goes, for experienced moms looking over the shoulders of their offspring: “If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”
In our families, in our community and in our country, maybe this Mother’s Day we can do more than just talk about peace. What’s going on in the family that needs some healing and help? In our community, with our own uncivil war over the Regents Road Bridge, maybe we can have moms lead a march for peace after the EIR comes out. Rather than have a knee-jerk reaction to the outcome, we can peacefully hold meaningful talks in the community instead of shouting matches. In our country, with elections on the horizon, shouldn’t moms demand peaceful political debates and a return to peaceful solutions to differences nationally and internationally? Howe and Jarvis strived to bring women together in the name of peace on Mother’s Day, a novel idea for this May 14, 2006.

Sandra Lippe, a former high school teacher with a master’s degree in creative writing, is a 33-year resident of University City with husband Ernie.