When Anna Jarvis founded Mother’s Day in 1912, she never intended the day to be anything more than a series of small, personal celebrations. It was a day for each individual family to come together and honor the mothers that have blessed their lives.
Jarvis, who had only two years before buried her own mother, then spent her life and her fortune trying to keep the focus of the second Sunday in May pure to her original vision: A day of sentiment spoken and shown from the heart. I think we all would agree that on this day of mass-produced greeting cards and television ads for flower bouquets, Jarvis was not entirely successful in her quest.
Long before Jarvis sought not only to honor her own mother, but to set aside time for families to honor theirs, the tug of war about motherhood had long begun. All aspects of society, from the political to the commercial, has had a vested interest in motherhood as an institution and an event. Given that, there is little wonder that Jarvis’s simple idea was quickly over-powered.
In 1847, sixty-five years before Jarvis began her quest, Dr. James Simpson was the first physician to women in labor chloroform to ease their pain. The following year Boston doctor Walter Channing used ether for a similar purpose. A whirlwind of protest began from the religious community, which believed that the contractions that associated labor were part of God’s curse upon women and should not be eased. Others argued that the pain of childbirth was required in order for a mother to love her child.
When women began to mail information to one another on how to prevent pregnancy — and, it is worth mentioning here that many women were dying young due in large part to the stress of childbirth — such mailings were quickly labeled as “obscene” materials that should not be delivered or received. Because society did recognize, at least after it was confronted with evidence, that women were dying in childbirth and from the stress of one pregnancy following another, birth control clinics were eventually opened. Even then, however, the only women that were supposed to be served were those for whom pregnancy and/or childbirth was considered physically dangerous or especially risky.
I’m not sure if there was ever a point in history in which motherhood wasn’t the co-opted property of people outside of its immediate sphere. From its being painted a sacred to it being portrayed as confinement, I agree with Jarvis that there should be a small slice of life away from the controversies. There should be a moment that we are free to just be moms without the worry of what another group or another person will necessarily think that means or represents.
