Origins of Mother's Day in the US:
"Mother's Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War. However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament."The idea was taken up by a West Virginian, Ann Jarvis, who sought to reconcile North and South after the Civil War and who worked in the real trenches - improving sanitation.
"When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The holiday was declared officially by some states beginning in 1912."Now the state stepped in to impose its own meaning on the practice:
"In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war."Long as you're waving the flag, it's all good, right?
Inevitably:
"Nine years after the first official Mother's Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become."Source (sorry):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother's_Day#Mother.27s_Day_in_the_United_StatesThose who don't know history are condemned to be blind, deaf and dumb. Just that.
THE MOTHER'S DAY PROCLAMATION
Julia Ward Howe, 1870
Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
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 our 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.
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