Mom-orabilia

Mother's Day history from Rhea to the soccer mom

May 3, 1999
Web posted at: 4:35 p.m. EDT (2035 GMT)

From Cathryn Meurer
Special to CNN Interactive

"God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers."

-- Jewish Proverb

(CNN) -- As Mother's Day comes around again in the United States, 88 years after President Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday, news of motherhood is often focused on celebrity moms. There's the former "material girl" now Madonna and child, for example. And Hillary Rodham Clinton is weathering empty-nest syndrome in that big white house in Washington.

But such famous contempo-moms aside, people have celebrated mothers and motherhood since ancient times in Greece. There, the focus of Hellenistic hoorays was Rhea, mother of the gods. She was honored as a subject of worship and festivals. Of course, so was Dionysus, whose party-down treatment of women might not have been as gentlemanly as could be wished. Old Greece was a place of many persuasions.

Moving on.

In the 17th century, the English paid tribute to their mums on Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent.

"Any mother could perform the jobs of several air-traffic controllers with ease." -- Lisa Alther

And in the United States, suffragist Julia Ward Howe proposed a mother's holiday in 1872, dedicated to peace. Howe's bid didn't go too far at the time. She's better remembered for the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," penned perhaps in a moment of motherly militancy.

The story of the U.S. observance we know today is really a tale of two Annas, a mother and daughter. And it starts before Howe made her pitch for the holiday.

The West Virginia State Archives tell us that Anna Maria Reeves Jarvis, born in 1832, was the daughter of Nancy Anna Jarvis and her Methodist-minister husband, Josiah. At age 20, Anna married a Baptist minister -- no mean cross-denominational feat, especially in those days -- and she and her new husband, Granville Jarvis, found themselves eventually in the town of Grafton, in what's now West Virginia.

As surviving Union and Confederate soldiers went home after the Civil War, community tensions were predictably high. So in the summer of 1965, Anna Jarvis organized a Mothers' Friendship Day event at the courthouse in Pruntytown. The idea was to bring together soldiers and neighbors of all political allegiances. And it echoed an informal tradition in which women on both sides of the "War Between the States" took flowers to the graves of thousands of slaughtered American mothers' sons -- defying all thought of whether the boys beneath their feet had been buried in a blue or gray uniform.

As war-crippled men and their families converged in Pruntytown, there were fears that violence would break out at any moment. But the result was peaceful and such a success that it was repeated for several years as the heat of war dissipated.

Jarvis died in 1905. Her own daughter, also Anna, picked up the torch in Philadelphia, holding a tribute on May 12, 1907. Young Anna pledged to work for a national Mother's Day as a salute to her own mother.

A year later, both Grafton and Philadelphia were the sites of key observances. And six years later, in 1911, Wilson signed a Congressional resolution that made Mother's Day a national holiday, anchored to the second Sunday in May.

"All that I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother. I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life."
-- Abraham Lincoln

When Mother's Day goes bad

Anna Jarvis the younger did not live happily ever after.

By 1923, she was filing lawsuits trying to stop celebrations of Mother's Day. She felt the observance she'd begun had been turned into a commercial exploitation. According to the Houston Chronicle's Holly Hildebrand, Jarvis was once arrested for trying to disrupt a mother's convention -- she'd found women there selling white carnations (Jarvis' favorite symbol for mothers) to raise money.

"This is not what I intended," Jarvis is quoted as saying. "I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit."

As many florists can tell you, however, economics prevailed. Jarvis died at age 84 in 1948. She'd never been a mother, herself. And she ended life so embittered that she told a reporter she was sorry she'd ever started Mother's Day.

Today etiquette books include guidelines for wearing carnations on Mother's Day: red or pink carnations are worn to recognize living mothers and white carnations represent mothers who have died. Of course, greeting cards are now a far more common way to mark the holiday, and Hallmark is standing by to provide you with 1,032 different greetings for Mother's Day 1999.

Diversity is the hallmark of end-of-this-century motherhood in the United States. Studies indicate that 72.3 percent of mothers with children 18 or younger participate in the labor force, compared with 27 percent in 1955. The "soccer moms," car phones glued to their ears as they ferry kids to activities, were identified as a demographic group during the last presidential election. Their votes today are avidly courted by Republicans and Democrats.

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them."
-- Mother Theresa

On the value and responsibilities of mothering, matriarch Rose Kennedy is often quoted. She said, "I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty, but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it." Kennedy raised nine children, including a president and two U.S. senators. When she died at age 104, she had 28 grandchildren and 41 great-grandchildren.

Internationally, a mother's holiday is observed in many cultures. The second Sunday in May is dedicated to mothers in Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Australia and Belgium, as it is in the United States.