Matthew Bowman: 'For a holiday today so associated with celebration, it is a stark lesson that Mother’s Day began with pain.'
by the top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also teaches. The proclamation does not define human beings first as individuals dedicated to their own success. It defines individuals first as people in relationships; as sons, daughters, parents, children. It repeats the ideas central to maternal thinking; that we are all inextricably responsible for one another, and that that responsibility is divinely mandated.
This is why, then, it can be disappointing to experience Mother’s Day as translated through the dominant lenses through which we see our world: individualism, consumerism, commercialism. It is right and good to honor the sacrifices parents make for their children. But Howe and Jarvis and the Latter-day Saints’ family proclamation point us past such a tight focus on individual action to see how motherhood is genuinely something that must be done with other people.
We have Mother’s Day today because of Anna Jarvis, Ann’s daughter. After her mother’s death, she made the day her cause. She held ceremonies at her church in Grafton, W.Va., beginning in 1907. She convened a mass gathering in Philadelphia, having persuaded the wealthy to sponsor and support her. She wrote letters to lawmakers, and in 1914 succeeded: Congress made the second Sunday in May the holiday.
By the 1920s, she was angrily protesting chocolate companies, greeting card companies and florists, who, she declared, had drawn the holiday away from the inspiration for collective action she hoped it would be and turned it into simply another day to buy something. “Candy! You take a box to Mother — then eat most of it yourself,” sheOf course, the day is here to stay. But Jarvis’ warning should be, too.
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