This year, Mother’s Day was almost eclipsed by important news announced just a few days earlier, an unknown source within the Supreme Court leaked the draft of a decision that strongly suggests that the court will overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling that has protected women’s reproductive freedom for nearly 50 years.  The holiday, once seen as an overly-commercialized, “Hallmark Holiday,” took a political edge, with some groups even proposing that mothers begin a week-long labor strike to raise awareness and put pressure on political leaders.

“I wasn’t surprised that people were talking about the ruling online, but I was surprised by how  much traction the strike got on Instagram,” said senior Reyaneh Nadi.  

A deep dive into the modern history of Mother’s Day shows that American celebrations of the holiday have always had roots in social consciousness.  Although the holiday was not always political, its precursor, Mothering Sunday was a religious day celebrated with gifts of flowers.

In 1868, not long after the end of the American Civil War, social activist Ann Jarvis, organized Mother’s Friendship Day as part of an effort to reunify the country after it had been torn apart by bloodshed.  In her version, the celebration brought together former soldiers from both sides, along with their families, in an effort to reconcile people who had once been combatants.  Although some in attendance were worried that the event would descend into violence, everything went peacefully.

A few years later, poet and activist Julia Ward Howe also envisioned the creation of a holiday commemorating mothers.  In her 1870 appeal to womanhood throughout the world, Howe calls for a “general congress of women” from all nations to be convened “to promote …  the great and general interests of peace.” 

“The mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering,” said Julia Ward Howe in The Mother’s Day Proclamation.

Howe’s proclamation calls upon mothers to oppose war, and explicitly rejects the logic to use violence in pursuit of justice.  By 1872, Howe had begun calling for an annual “Mother’s Day For Peace,” which she imagined would promote peace every year on Jun. 2.  

It was not until the twentieth century that the dream of a holiday celebrating mothers started to become reality.  A few years after Jarvis died, her daughter, Anna Jarvis, created what is often regarded as the first true Mother’s Day—a service at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia.  Over the next few years, states began making the holiday official.  Finally, in 1914, Congress made the second Sunday in May a federal holiday, with then-President Woodrow Wilson instructing celebrants to fly the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.

Over the years since, the holiday has been shaped and remade by the same forces that have made our own lives what they are.  The holiday’s commercialization—the billions of dollars Americans spend on cards, flowers, jewelry, and other gifts, not to mention the ad revenue companies sink into promoting the holiday—have made it an industry on par with Valentine’s Day.  This has made many celebrants cynical.

“On Mother’s Day, I saw so many posts honoring mothers on my Instagram feed, and it really goes to show the effect of technology on the way that we celebrate holidays,” said senior Mia Perulli.  

Meanwhile, technology has allowed many of us to remake the holiday in our own images.  As long as social media has existed, people have celebrated Mother’s Day by posting pictures of their own mothers—a new tradition that enables social media users to see a wide range of mothers practicing motherhood in a variety of different ways and varying cultural settings.

This practice of celebrating moms on social media has also allowed younger people to bring their own, more-inclusive attention to the day.  Recent years have seen special attention paid not only to the mothers who have always been honored, but also to moms who have lost children, or women who are unable to have children of their own.  Now, the holiday invites us to question our assumptions, both about who can be considered a mom and about what moms do.  These questions extend quite naturally from present-day concerns surrounding gender norms and representation.

Current questions honor the often-radical political visions of the holiday and those who played their parts in creating it.  After all, Jarvis wanted to create national unity to undo the fragmentation sparked by half a decade of civil war; Howe’s vision of an anti-war movement led by women was part of her larger vision of female suffrage.  In this context, using Mother’s Day to critique the government almost seems perfectly fitting.