While Mothers have been celebrated in Greek and Roman mythology, it was Ann Reeves Jarvis in the 1850s who held Mother’s Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions to help lower infant mortality rates. These clubs tended wounded soldiers from both sides during the Civil War, and after the war, in 1870, Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation:
“…As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summon of war, let women…take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace…”
This was just the beginning. It took Ann Reeves Jarvis’s daughter to start organizing modern-era Mother’s Day observations in 1908 and finally achieving recognition by President Wilson in 1914. Ms. Reeves, however, resented the commercialization of the Day and fought the rest of her life to eliminate this aspect from the holiday. Well, more phone calls are made on Mother’s Day than any other day of the year. If a phone call is commercialization, then I am all for it!
Jeff Bensch 