Day is celebrated this Sunday (12) in Brazil and around the world. Although maternity celebrations have been around since ancient Greece and Rome, the official event we celebrate today was recently made official.
The date was established on April 26, 1910, in the United States. The event marked five years of a campaign by Anna Jarvis to choose a date that would celebrate mothers, especially those who have passed away or who have lost their children – like her own mother, named Ann.
After losing 10 of her 13 children to childhood illnesses, Ann became a social activist in the fight against infant mortality in the area where she lived.
In 1858, she founded support groups for families in the region who experienced cases of this trauma, which was very common at the time because of the lack of basic sanitation, vaccines and specific health services.
The groups even attended to soldiers wounded in the American Civil War – then worked to reconcile families affected by the conflict.
However, Ann died in 1905. With that, daughter Anna took her mother’s activism into her own. The first celebration of Mother’s Day took place in 1908, with a memorial created by Anna Jarvis in honor of Ann. She began organizing annual picnics on so-called “Mother’s Days” as a way to encourage women to participate in politics and promote peace.
Other people took an interest in the date, and in 1910, the commemoration was made official in his state, West Virginia.
Revolt and boycott
When President Woodrow Wilson made the date official in every state in the country in 1914, Anna was outraged. That’s because she didn’t want such an important celebration to have a commercial bias.
As a result, she began to boycott the date that her own mother helped to create – organizing protests against establishments that took advantage of the date to profit, such as flower shops.
“She never wanted it to become a day for giving expensive and expensive gifts, as other holidays became in the early 20th century,” Katharine Lane Antolini, author of a book about Anna, told BBC Brasil.
The revolt was so great that Anna even organized protests against flower shops, which increased the prices of flowers around Mother’s Day.
Mother’s Day arrived in Brazil in 1918
The date arrived in Brazil in 1918, four years after it was made official. The first commemoration was held on May 12 of that year, in the city of Porto Alegre, by the Young Men’s Christian Association.
14 years later, in 1932, President Getúlio Vargas instituted the celebration throughout the country.
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