Aylee
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Joined: 10/14/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jlf1961
Why is it that mother's day is sacred, but father's day is just another day?
I hope that you wanted a serious answer Jeff.
Mother's Day originated to celebrate the organized activities of women *outside* the home. It became trivialized and commercialized only after it became confined to "special" nuclear family relations. The people who inspired Mother's Day had quite a different idea about what made mothers special. They believed that motherhood was a *political* force. They wished to celebrate mothers' social roles as community organizers, honoring women who acted on behalf of the entire future generation rather than simply putting their own children first.
This was in the mid 1800's of course.
Most of these ceremonies and proposals, significantly, were couched in the plural, not the singular, mode: Mothers' Day was originally a vehicle for organized socail and political action by all mothers, not for celebrating the private services of one's own particular mother. When Anna Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, began a letter-writing campaign to have a special day set aside for mothers. But by this period, there was already considerable pressure to sever the personal meaning of motherhood from its earlier political associations. The mobilization of women as community organizers was the last thing on the minds of the prominent merchants, racist politicians, and antisuffragist activists who, sometimes to Jarvis's dismay, quickly jumped on the bandwagon. In fact, the adoption of Mother's Day by the 63rd Congress on May 8, 1914 represented a reversal of everything the nineteenth-century mothers' days had stood for. The speeches proclaiming Mother's Day in 1914 linked it to celebration of home life and privacy; they repudiated women's social role beyond the household.
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Father's Day on the other hand, was seen as one more way to fill the calender with mindless promotions for merchants and advertisers.
Suggested reading and information source: "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap" by Stephanie Coontz
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RE: The Holly and Potty Show - 
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