Why everyone, even feminists, likes Mother’s Day

You’d never think it now that every retail outlet is busily promoting pink/floral/chocolate/smelly items to mark Mother’s Day, but it wasn’t always a thing in Ireland. Until the 1960s it didn’t feature; by the 70s the highlight was a bunch of daffodils for the lucky parent plus a card that featured the immortal verse: “To one Who Bears the Sweetest Name/And Adds a Lustre to the Same.” Not an orgy of consumption then.

In fact, Mothering Sunday – as it is called in the UK – is a funny sort of hybrid. In large part it’s a southern English custom, perhaps deriving from the medieval rite whereby parishioners processed from their parish church to their “mother” church or cathedral midway through Lent. But as the social historian, Ronald Hutton, observes, the first evidence for the custom is a poem by Robert Herrick in the mid-17th century, about “going a-mothering”. By this time, the Sunday midway through Lent (for which the epistle reading was “Jerusalem, mater omnium”, Jerusalem mother of all) had become the time when servants returned to their own parish church and visited their mothers, often with a simnel cake made with fine flour.

Those family get-togethers were small-scale affairs. The full-blown, commercial, sentimental festival we have now owes everything to Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia, whose devotion to her own mother led her to campaign for the establishment of a day to honour all mothers; the first was held in the US in 1908. Jarvis sent white carnations on the basis that “its whiteness is to symbolise the truth, purity and broad-charity of mother love”. In 1912, she created the International Mother’s Day Association. And in 1914, the US congress instituted a holiday on the second Sunday in May to commemorate mothers, which Woodrow Wilson followed with a presidential proclamation.

It took next to no time for US florists, confectioners and greeting-card manufacturers to realise the commercial possibilities of an occasion in which most of the population was eligible to take part, either as donors or recipients. Jarvis, revolted at the commercialisation of her festival (she disliked greeting cards as a bad substitute for an actual letter) and the rocketing price of carnations, ended up lobbying for the public holiday to be rescinded; in 1948 she was arrested for disturbing the peace while doing so. On the bright side, the greeting card and confectionary industries paid the fees for the sanatorium in which she spent her last years.

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Modern Mother’s Day, still celebrated here and in Britain on the Sunday midway through Lent – this coming Sunday – is, then, a combination of the English Mothering Sunday and the US version. But in its ruthless commercialism, it owes more to its American sister. Like Halloween, what was originally an Irish folk celebration which was subsequently co-opted by US commercial interests, it’s now inexorably associated with chocolate.

What’s interesting is that it has survived despite being a celebration of the most traditional aspect of women’s identity: being a mother. Nowadays that concept has been transformed by reproductive technology. It’s possible for a child born to a surrogate to technically have three mothers: the (gamete) donor mother, the gestational mother and the mother who brings up baby. But the sentiment around mothers is unproblematic even for most feminists. Of all the festivals in the contemporary calendar it’s probably the most inclusive, notwithstanding its origins in church, since everyone had or has a mother, and lots of people are mothers. As Hutton put it, “a regional tradition, developed to ease unequal relationships in a hierarchical society has (like Christmas) been reinvented to serve the new cult of the family”.

It may not be pushing things too far to see the US take on the day, a very Protestant celebration of individual mothers (Miss Jarvis was a stalwart of the Methodist Church), as a way of recompense for the absence in the American Protestant calendar of any festival to rival the Catholic feastdays to celebrate the Virgin, the universal mother of us all.

Actually, the Romans had their own celebration of motherhood in the Matronalia, a feast of Juno, goddess of childbirth, on March 1st, the first day of the year, when Roman mothers went to the temple of Juno, wore their tunics loose and their hair down, and were waited on by their husbands and daughters; it was the slaves’ day off too. Not that far, then, from our take on it.

In communist countries, by contrast, it was International Women’s Day, a more obviously inclusive affair, which took precedence; that’s when women were taken out to dinner and given flowers.

Did I say that traditional Ireland didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day? Well, we sort of did. How about the old custom that the Epiphany, January 6th, is Women’s Christmas? Oíche Nollaig na mBan is when women had the day off to go visiting their friends and didn’t have to cook, by way of recompense for their work over the festive season. That’s a Mother’s Day that all women can get behind – little wonder it has been so enthusiastically revived and celebrated in recent years.

Melanie McDonagh is writer at large for the Evening Standard