Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A History of Mother's Day

Episode Date: May 9, 2021

Every year, on the second Sunday in May, 96 countries around the world celebrate Mother’s Day. Dozens of other countries celebrate the same thing on different days throughout the year. Mother’s Day wasn’t always a thing, however. Its creation was due to a small number of very determined people...and of course greeting card companies. Learn more about Mother’s Day and how it became a holiday on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every year on the second Sunday in May, 96 countries around the world celebrate Mother's Day. Dozens of other countries celebrate the same thing on different days throughout the year. Mother's Day wasn't always a thing, however. Its creation was due to a small number of very determined women and, of course, greeting card companies. Learn more about Mother's Day and how it became a holiday on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Skillshare. To paraphrase the great Napoleon dynamite, you've got to have skills. There is a whole universe of things you can learn to better yourself. self, and Skillshare can help you do it. Some of the most popular classes on Skillshare include iPhone photography, Adobe Illustrator, watercolor painting, interior design, and creating videos for YouTube.

With Skillshare Premium, you can have unlimited access to everything for as low as 825 per month. Go to everything-dash-everywhere.com slash Skillshare to get a free two-week trial of Skillshare premium membership, or just click on the link in the show notes. I know I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but the history of Mother's Day goes back to the ancient Mediterranean. The ancient Phrygian people, who came from the region which is now modern Turkey, had a goddess named Sibley, which was the motherhood goddess. Sibley was sort of adopted by the Greeks who put elements of it into their life goddess of Gaia, their mother goddess of Rhea, and the harvest mother goddess of Demeter. The Romans took the goddess Sibley and turned it into the Magna Mater, or the Great Mother. The feast day for the motherhood goddess was really a feast for the goddess and motherhood,

not for mothers per se. If anything, mothers had extra duties on the feast day as far as going to the temple and sacrificing, and it wasn't a day for doing stuff for mothers or giving them gifts. Something closer to our modern Mother's Day took place in medieval Europe with Mothering Sunday. Mothering Sunday wasn't exactly like Modern Mother's Day. It took place during Lent, and it was a respite for fasting during the long. Lenton season. The date became sort of a homecoming where people were expected to go back to their mother church, which was usually the church where they were baptized or their local parish church.

There was also a lot of association with Mary the Mother of Jesus. Eventually, this only really was a holiday in England and only on the Anglican church calendar. And there was a modern movement to bring it back in the 20th century in response to the modern version of Mother's Day. Of the countries which don't celebrate Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May, most but not all, will celebrate the day alongside a Christian Holy Day, which is usually associated with Mary, and these are often the Feast of the Annunciation or the Immaculate Conception. The modern version of Mother's Day is fundamentally an American holiday, and it can be attributed to three women, and one in particular. The first was Anne Jarvis of West Virginia. She had established something called Mother's Day

work clubs, which were a day when young mothers were taught about child rearing and sanitation. She then worked on the creation of a mother's friendship day, which was to reunite families which had been divided from the United States Civil War. She worked for a national day to recognize mothers, but it never came to fruition in her lifetime. In the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, there was a peace movement amongst mothers who had sons who fought or died in the war. In 1872, Julia Ward Howe, the same woman who wrote the Battle of the Republic, created a Mother's Day for Peace on June 2nd. She also wrote the appeal to womanhood through the world,

which is today known as the Mother's Day Proclamation. The goal of the day was more about peace than it was about motherhood or a day for mothers. It was done in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. The Mother's Day for Peace lasted a few years, mostly in Boston, which was directly funded by Julia Ward Howe herself, and then it just sort of petered out. The town of Albion, Michigan, established a Mother's Day on May 13, 1877, but it got embroiled in local temperance movement politics, and it too never got anywhere. The creation of the modern Mother's Day finally came about with the death of the previous mentioned Anne Jarvis in 1905.

When I say it came about from her death, I mean that quite literally. Her daughter, Anna Jarvis, led the efforts to create a national day for mothers in honor of her mother who had always wanted such a day created. Anna Jarvis, her daughter, had a background in advertising and really had a much more coherent plan for getting her idea implemented. The first Mother's Day service was held on May 12, 1907, in the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia. Today, the church is known as the location of the International Mother's Day Shrine. In 1908, there was another service in West Virginia and a much larger celebration at the Wanamaker Department store in Philadelphia. In 1909, the celebrations were held in 45 states as well as in Canada and Mexico. Jarvis pushed state governments and the federal government for recognition of the holiday.

The first state to officially recognize Mother's Day was West Virginia, and other states followed closely behind. In 1913, Congress passed a resolution asking everyone in government to wear a white carnation on Mother's Day, which is the flower now associated with the holiday. and in 1914, Congress officially passed a resolution requesting the president to declare Mother's Day an official holiday. The next day, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first National Mother's Day. In that first proclamation, it was to honor mothers who had sons who died in the war. The reason why the second Sunday in May is the date of Mother's Day is that it's close to the anniversary of Anne Jarvis's death. The reason why carnations are associated with Mother's Day is that it was her favorite flower. Now, Anna Jarvis, the daughter, was very savvy.

She got Mother's Day recognized as a holiday through a very organized campaign, and she also had the assistance of florists who were all behind the idea of Mother's Day. She also got trademarks for the phrases Second Sunday in May and Mother's Day, and also created the Mother's Day International Association. Mother's Day quickly became big business. The florist she originally worked with, along with candy makers, were making tons of money, and Jarvis became obsessed with getting credit for Mother's Day. By 1923 in an interview with the New York Times, she ended up denouncing Mother's Day because

of how commercial it had become. Over the years, she spent all of her money fighting for credit and against the commercialization of Mother's Day. In 1948, she was arrested for disturbing the peace for protesting Mother's Day, and was quoted as saying that she, quote, wish she would have never started the day because it became so out of control, unquote. She was later put in a sanitarium, and her costs were covered by the very florists and greeting card companies who had made so much money off of her creation. She died penniless in 1948. Today, Mother's Day is still big business. It's estimated that $28 billion will be spent on Mother's Day in 2021, with billions being spent on flowers, jewelry, visits to rest of.

restaurants, greeting cards, and of course, spa treatment gift certificates. So, happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there. To everyone else, go and call your mom or do something nice for her. I'm sure we can all agree with the words of Abraham Lincoln, who said, quote, that all I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel mother. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters.

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