Mother's Day: A Brief History

Mother's Day is a great day to honor the woman who brought you into the world. It is a good time to celebrate everything great about moms. While most people celebrate this holiday, few people know the history behind it.

Mother's Day is thought to have begun in ancient Greece. Known as "mother worship", this festival to Cybele, a goddess who represented the fertility of earth, was held during the Vernal Equinox in Anatolia. Gifts were not given during this festival like they are doing our modern Mother's Day.

The holiday we know today was first established in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe in Boston, Massachusetts. Howe made her Mother's Day Proclamation in hopes to inspire women pacifism. The early celebration of the holiday was pushed forward by women's peace groups and those mother's who had lost sons in the Civil War. Less than seven years after her proclamation, Albion, Michigan became the first city to observe the holiday. This observance began the tradition of celebrating Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May. It took many years before it was officially recognized. Several groups and individuals had campaigns to spread the world about Mother's Day. The federal government finally got the message and on May 14, 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed an official proclamation to make Mother's Day a national holiday.

The original proclamation by Howe read like this:
Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have breasts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
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 -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.