Originally posted on Fusion:
Sunday, May 10 is Mother’s Day in the United States.
For weeks, florists, chain restaurants, and greeting card purveyors have been inviting us to celebrate the occasion by buying things to honor our biological, adopted, in-law, “spiritual,” or any other people we call mothers. Those who profit financially from Mother’s Day remind us to celebrate maternity and femininity — often depicted as a nurturing and caring white mother who put her life on hold to raise her babies — but day after day, I watch many mothers grieve the loss of their children to the strangleholds and bullets of police officers, and I keep coming around to the question: Which mothers count on Mother’s Day?
The origins of Mother’s Day start with 19th-century abolitionism and feminism, with white abolitionist Julia Ward Howe calling for a “Mother’s Peace Day” in the 1870s. In the first decade of the 20th century, Anna Jarvis, another…
View original 869 more words