4 minutes reading time
2011 it was Facebook. Twitter.
Now it's the WhatsApp status. Every person in every contact list — aunts, former colleagues, the man who fixed my inverter battery, the woman from the apartment below who complained about my dog once — all of them, today, have put up something. A candle. A cartoon carnation. "Happy Mother's Day" in a font that is trying very hard to look handwritten. The blue circle around the profile picture means they've uploaded a status. The circle burns all day.
I use Instagram for my own shameful reasons — I won't pretend otherwise, I scroll because sometimes a pretty girl posts something and that's just the honest truth of it — but even there, today, you cannot escape. Between the reels, between everything I actually opened the app for, there is this wall of pastel-colored devotion. AI-generated flowers. Text over sunsets. "Words can't describe what you mean to me, Amma."
They found words. They found many words. They posted them publicly.
I wrote about Anna Jarvis fourteen years ago. How she built this holiday and then spent the rest of her life trying to dismantle it. How she died broke in a sanitarium while the greeting card companies quietly paid her bills. The supreme cosmic joke.
But I've been thinking lately about the other version. The one that didn't win.
Before Anna Jarvis, there was Julia Ward Howe.
You might know her name from something else — she wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic during the Civil War. She was already famous by the time she wrote what she called the Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870. And she was not a woman who wrote quiet things.
She was an abolitionist. A women's suffrage campaigner. A person who had seen the Civil War up close and had apparently decided she was done watching men send each other's sons to die while everyone called it noble. Then the Franco-Prussian War started, and she'd had enough.
The proclamation she wrote in 1870 is not a greeting card. It doesn't have any carnations in it. It opens like this:
Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts... Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
She was calling for a congress of women, international, across borders, to organize for peace. Not for flowers. Not for cards. For women to stand together and say — we are the ones who carry these children and watch them be fed into wars decided by people who feel nothing. This has to stop.
She called it Mothers' Day. Apostrophe after the s. A day belonging to all mothers. Collective. Political. Plural.
When Woodrow Wilson signed Anna Jarvis's version into law in 1914, the apostrophe moved. Mother's Day. Before the s. Your mother. My mother. Each person's individual private mother, to be honoured individually, in private sentiment. The political spine was removed. What was left was a feeling. And feelings are easy to package.
One apostrophe. That's all it took.
Howe wanted a congress. She got a Hallmark aisle. Jarvis wanted a handwritten letter. She got a WhatsApp status with a glitter animation.
Would Mothers' Day have survived better? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. The same machinery that ate Jarvis's holiday would have had a go at Howe's eventually. Capitalism is patient, and it is hungry, and it has never once failed to find the sentimental core of something and squeeze it for revenue. A political holiday becomes a ribbon. A ribbon becomes a product. The product sells.
But there's something about the apostrophe that bothers me. It's so small. It's the kind of thing an editor changes without thinking, or a typesetter gets wrong, and then it's in the official record and that's that. Plural becomes singular. Collective becomes individual. Public becomes private. And once it's private, it's harmless. Once it's harmless, it's merchandise.
In 2011 I felt bad for Anna Jarvis going door to door in Philadelphia.
In 2025, I'm sitting with my phone, watching someone's WhatsApp status — a woman I haven't spoken to in four years — and her status says "My world" over a photo of her mother, who is definitely not on WhatsApp, who probably doesn't know this photo was taken, and I'm thinking about Julia Ward Howe in 1870, furious and alive, calling on the women of the world to arise.
Nobody arose.
We got blue rings around profile pictures instead.