The Origin of Mother’s Day: 5 Surprising Facts About the Holiday

The Origin of Mother’s Day: 5 Surprising Facts About the Holiday

Good Housekeeping        April 13, 2020

These days, Mother's Day is all about greeting cards and flowers — but the history is more complex than you might know.

The Origin of Mother’s Day: 5 Surprising Facts About the Holiday

For many people, Mother’s Day is simply a joyous occasion each May, a time to spend with our children and our mothers — marked by flowers, cards, and maybe some mimosas over brunch. So you might be surprised to learn that its cheerful greeting card messages belie a much darker, more complicated origin story. In fact, Mother’s Day traces its roots back to wartime traumas, and includes plenty of controversy.

Here are five surprising facts you may not have known about Mother’s Day and its complex origins.

1) Mother’s Day officially began as a tribute to one woman.

Anna Reeves Jarvis is most often credited with founding Mother’s Day. After her mother Ann died on May 9, 1905, Jarvis set out to create a day that would honor her and moms as a group.

 She began the movement in West Virginia, which prides itself on hosting the first official Mother's Day celebration three years later at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, according to CNN. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill recognizing Jarvis' idea as a national holiday to be celebrated each second Sunday in May.

2) But before that, Mother’s Day started as an anti-war movement.

Although Jarvis is widely credited as the holiday’s founder, others had floated the idea earlier — with a different agenda in mind, according to National Geographic. The poet and author Julia Ward Howe (pictured here) had aimed to promote a Mothers’ Peace Day decades before.

For her and the antiwar activists who agreed with her position — including Jarvis’ own mother — the idea of Mother’s Day should spread unity across the globe in the wake of so much trauma following the Civil War in America and Franco-Prussian War in Europe.

“Howe called for women to gather once a year in parlors, churches, or social halls, to listen to sermons, present essays, sing hymns or pray if they wished — all in the name of promoting peace,” West Virginia Wesleyan College historian Katharine Antolini noted, as cited by National Geographic.

These early attempts to create a cohesive peace-focused Mother’s Day eventually receded when the other concept took hold.

3) Mother’s Day is a $25 billion commercial holiday.

These days, Mother’s Day is a $25 billion holiday in America, with those who celebrate spending about $200 on mom, according to National Retail Federation data published in 2019.

More people buy flowers for Mother’s Day than any other time of year except during the Christmas and Hanukkah season. Gift givers spend more than $5 billion on jewelry alone, and nearly another $5 billion on that special outing. Then there’s $843 million on cards, and $2.6 billion each on flowers and gift certificates, according to the data.

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