The Hip Mamas take on Mother's Day

Mother's Day: Up and At 'Em, Mama! by Hilary Selden Illick

When Mother's Day was first born in 1872, breakfast in bed, Hallmark cards, store-bought bouquets and being taken out for brunch wasn't anywhere near the point. Then called Mother's Peace Day, the holiday was supposed to celebrate the values represented by motherhood -- peace, mercy, charity, and patience -- and the broader social and political implications of those values.

When Julia Ward Howe first conceived of Mother's Day ... a million moms marching in our nation's capitol to protest gun violence is precisely the sort of celebration she had in mind. Howe, who had written the Battle Hymn of the Republic during the Civil War to encourage demoralized soldiers, had an epiphany once the war was over. She was surrounded by mourning mothers who had lost their sons. Overseas, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, brutally claiming lives. Howe suddenly saw this war as "a return to barbarism, the issue being one that could have been solved without bloodshed." And a question occurred to her, one that would determine the course of the rest of her life: "Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?"

By the early 1900's, another version of Mother's Day was gaining popularity, and in 1914 was adopted by Congress as a national holiday, to be celebrated the second Sunday each May. The holiday proposed by Anna Jarvis owed its origins to her own mother's Mothers' Work Days, whereby mothers from her hometown in Grafton, West Virginia would go into Appalachia to work on improving the poorer community's sanitation. Originally this Mother's Day, like the one proposed by Julia Ward Howe, was intended to inspire mothers and non-mothers alike to transcend individual family life and work towards a better world.