Bring back the original purpose of Mother’s Day

With Mother’s Day approaching, several national and international companies have been contacting consumers, offering the opportunity to opt out of the forthcoming deluge of mom-themed flower, jewelry and candy advertisements.

In response, some have lauded companies’ attempts to be sensitive to those who have lost their mothers and to those who are struggling with infertility. Others have condemned the apparent capitulation to the left and its seeming contempt for traditional families, as Mother’s Day (but not, say, Pride Month) is singled out for personal abstention.

But both these perspectives miss the broader point: The celebration of motherhood — just like motherhood itself — is no longer viewed as a societal good, but as a morally neutral matter of personal consumer preference. 

Call me a cynic, but it is my working assumption that, whatever their other interests, for-profit corporations’ highest goal is to make money. They must have come to the conclusion that bombarding some people with Mother’s Day-themed products while allowing others to opt out of that bombardment is good business. Whether these companies are correct or profoundly mistaken (à la Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney fiasco), the marketing technique says less about corporations’ relationship to traditional family values than it does about consumers’ commercialized understanding of parenthood itself.

Today, the work of raising children is treated less like a public service than like an all-consuming hobby. Reflecting this, Mother’s Day is celebrated as a personal holiday — not a national one. I will experience May 14th this year, for example, in a way that is likely to be defined by my three young children’s gluey, construction paper creations, as well as by my own mother’s penchant for pound cake. My family will celebrate that I am a mother, and that we are blessed by my own mother’s continued health and presence in our lives.

But in the early 20th century, the celebration of Mother’s Day was much more universal, as was the understanding of motherhood itself as social good.

The holiday was inspired by the 1905 death of Anna Reeves Jarvis, whose daughter first proposed the idea of a universal celebration of motherhood. When her mother died, Anna Jarvis, who was not herself a mother, obtained financial support from the famed Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker to host celebrations honoring all mothers’ sacrifices. By 1912, the holiday was an annual event; by the 1920s, however, Jarvis was deeply dismayed by the descent into corporate materialism that would eventually result in today’s thoroughly privatized (and, therefore, optional) celebrations.

For the perennially childless and newly motherless Jarvis, motherhood was a public rather than a private good. But today, we are far too polarized as a society to agree on uniform public goods. So, those Americans who have no personal, private relationship to motherhood are assumed to want to avoid rather than embrace Mother’s Day.

Given the modern commercialization of the holiday, this does make sense: I am in no way suggesting that someone who just lost her mother should continue to receive tear-jerking texts from some corporation trying to sell her flowers if there’s a way to opt out. Still, Jarvis’ original purpose for Mother’s Day — nationwide gratitude to all mothers, whose stewarding of the next American generation is rightly conceived as a civic service performed by some for the benefit of al l —should be universal rather than controversial.

With or without Mother’s Day celebrations, this understanding of motherhood as a public-spirited sacrifice, not just to one’s family but to society as a whole, is more than overdue for a comeback.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a freelance writer, an America’s Future Foundation Writing Fellowship alumna and a Young Voices contributor. Her work has appeared in America Magazine, Deseret News, Law and Liberty, Real Clear Books & Culture, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Philadelphia Inquirer.