Mother’s Day In The USA 2023 – The History of A Wonderful Celebration

Mother’s Day is a global festival honoring mothers that is observed in many nations. The festival is celebrated on the second Sunday in May and has its roots in the United States. Many other nations observe the holiday on this day, while others do it at different periods during the year.

On Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, the tradition of permitting individuals who had relocated to visit their home parishes and their mothers emerged throughout the Middle Ages. This evolved into Mothering Sunday in Britain, where it persisted into the contemporary day despite Mother’s Day mainly displacing it.

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Mother’s Day: First Attempt

Women’s peace organizations in the United States attempted to establish festivals and regular events in support of peace and against war during the 19th century. The gathering of mothers whose sons had served or perished on opposing sides in the American Civil War was a typical early practice.

The goal of “Mother’s Friendship Day,” which was established in 1868, was “to reunite families that had been divided during the Civil War,” according to Ann Jarvis, Anna Jarvis’s mother. When a typhoid outbreak hit both Union and Confederate encampments, Ann Jarvis founded Mother’s Day Work Clubs to enhance sanitation and health. She intended to turn this into an annual celebration for mothers, but she passed away in 1905 before this could happen. Her daughter, who almost developed an obsession with her, would carry on her mother’s work.

Several modest celebrations took place throughout the 1870s and 1880s. However, none went beyond the local level of resonance. Protestant schools held numerous events and observances at the time, including Children’s Day, Temperance Sunday, Roll Call Day, Decision Day, and Missionary Day, among others.

On June 2, 1872, Julia Ward Howe organized an anti-war event called “Mother’s Day for Peace” in New York City, which was accompanied by an “Appeal to womanhood throughout the world” (now known as the Mother’s Day Proclamation). Under Howe’s patronage, the celebration persisted in Boston for around ten years before it was abandoned. Mothers from all across the world will promote world peace during these events.

A Mother’s Day celebration was held in Albion, Michigan on May 13, 1877, several years later due to a conflict involving the temperance movement. An anti-temperance group allegedly forced the Rev. Myron Daughterty’s son and two other temperance advocates to spend the night in a saloon and get drunk in front of the community, prompting the pioneer of Albion Juliet Calhoun Blakeley to step up and finish the sermon.

Blakeley invited other mothers to join her from the pulpit. Blakeley’s two sons, who were both traveling salespeople, were so moved by their mother’s memory that they decided to visit each year to honor her and launched a campaign to get their business associates to do the same. The Methodist Episcopal Church in Albion set aside the second Sunday in May to honor mothers’ unique contributions at their urging in the early 1880s.

The President of the Fraternal Order of Eagles and alumnus of the University of Notre Dame, Frank E. Hering, argued in 1904 for “designating one day in the year as a nationwide memorial to the memories of Mothers and motherhood.” Hering was a passionate supporter of a national Mother’s Day for the following ten years after seeing a class of Notre Dame students send home penny postcards to their mothers.

The Establishment

Following the passing of her mother, Ann Jarvis, on May 9, 1905, Anna Jarvis helped Philadelphia businessman John Wanamaker create Mother’s Day in its current form. Jarvis always claimed that she was the only creator of Mother’s Day and never mentioned Howe, Mothering Sunday, or any relation to the Protestant school celebrations.

On May 12, 1907, a small service was held in the Grafton, West Virginia, Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church, where Anna’s mother had been a Sunday school teacher. On May 10, 1908, the same church hosted the first “official” worship session, which was followed by a larger event in the Wanamaker Auditorium of the Philadelphia Wanamaker’s department store. The next year, it was said that many people in New York commemorated the day.

Then Jarvis ran a campaign to make Mother’s Day first a national holiday in the United States and eventually a worldwide celebration. In 1910, West Virginia became the first state to formally establish the holiday, and the other states shortly followed.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution on May 10, 1913, requesting that every member of the federal government, starting with the president, wear a white carnation on May Day. The second Sunday in May is designated as Mother’s Day by a statute passed by the United States Congress on May 8, 1914, along with a request for a proclamation.

The following day, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation establishing the first national Mother’s Day as a day for Americans to display the flag in remembrance of the mothers of fallen soldiers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized a stamp honoring the occasion in 1934.

The House of Representatives voted twice on a resolution honoring Mother’s Day in May 2008, with the first vote passing with no objections (21 members not voting). The inaugural ceremony was conducted at the Saint Andrews Methodist Church, which is now the International Mother’s Day Shrine and a National Historic Landmark.