Mother's Day

Honoring Mothers in History

Americans, of course, were not the first to reserve a day of tribute for mothers; the practice dates back to antiquity. The honoring of a mother goddess, for example, was evident across cultures. The ancient Greeks honored Rhea, the mother of Zeus. And ancient Romans celebrated the mother goddess Cybele with a three-day spring festival, known as the Hilaria, on the Ides of March. The early Christians designated the fourth Sunday in Lent as Mothering Sunday. In England, parishioners first celebrated Mothering Sunday by returning to the church of their baptism to pay tribute. By the 1600s, the celebration broadened to include the practice of apprentices and servants returning home with small gifts of tribute for their mothers.

Precursors of Anna Jarvis

History credits Anna Jarvis as the official founder of Mother's Day due to her success at securing its national recognition, but others promoted the idea before her. Ann Reeves Jarvis (1832–1905) first organized mothers into Mothers' Day Work Clubs in 1858 to combat rising infant and child mortality rates caused by unsanitary living conditions in Webster, Virginia (now West Virginia). The clubs continued to provide medical aid and service to soldiers during the Civil War. In the early years following the war, Ann Reeves Jarvis led club members in Mothers' Friendship Days to address the animosity felt by returning Union and Confederate soldiers in the community. Legend contends that her daughter, Anna Jarvis, always remembered her mother's special plea for a day honoring the service of mothers and she promised over her mother's grave to fulfill that greatest wish.

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), a suffragist and the famed author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, promoted a Mother's Peace Day through her work with international peace organizations. In her 1870 proclamation, Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World, Howe encouraged the cooperation of women to ensure world peace and protect the lives of those they bore and nurtured as mothers. She designated the second of June as a Mother's Day. American peace organizations, primarily in the northeast, observed Mother's Peace Day until the early 20th century.

Juliet Calhoun Blakeley (1818–1920) led the first known Mother's Day service on May 13, 1877, in Albion, Michigan. According to the legend, opponents attempted to scandalize prominent leaders of the local temperance movement by luring their sons into a saloon and parading the intoxicated boys around town. The reverend of the First Methodist [Page 858]Episcopal Church—and father of one of the drunken boys—was unable to lead the following morning service due to the affair, and Blakeley rose to fill the empty pulpit. She called on the rest of the mothers in attendance to join her in encouraging the congregation to support the temperance crusade. The church honored Blakeley around her birthday each year, on the second Sunday in May, until her death at the age of 102. Her sons, Charles and Moses, used their careers as traveling salesman to promote the celebration of a Mother's Day to friends and business associates outside of Albion.

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