about: several worldwide days celebrating motherhood

Mother's Day owes its origins to several long standing traditions in Europe and the UK where a specific Sunday was set aside to honor motherhood and mothers. Traditionally the day was marked by the giving of token gifts and the relinquishing of certain traditionally female tasks such as cooking and cleaning to other members of the family as a gesture of appreciation.

While the role of the woman has become less rigid in modern day society Mother's Day (or Mothering Sunday) as it has been called in the UK dating back to the sixteenth century, remains an important day for the honoring of the role that mother's play in the home and in society in general. There is a corresponding holiday for Fathers called, not surprisingly, Father's Day, but most sources site this as a more recent addition coming about in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

While considered by many as a "Hallmark Holiday", i.e. one with a purely commercial background, Mother's Day is actually a long standing tradition in the UK and several countries in Europe, and has corresponding equivalents in many countries, including parts of India and many communities in Eastern Africa and the Far East.

The modern Mother's Day holiday in the United States has been attributed to concerted efforts by American Anna Jarvis and her Mother's Day International Association which she founded in 1912. The idea, however, that this is not linked in any way to the older British and European versions, from where the majority of the of original North American settlers originated, is clearly spurious.

A Mother's Day cake, one of many was a traditional family might celebrate Mother's Day, or Mothering Sunday

Historical antecedents

Different countries celebrate Mother's Day on various days of the year because the day has a number of different origins.Fact: date=March 2009

One school of thoughtWho: date=March 2009

The ancient Romans also had another holiday, Matronalia, that was dedicated to Juno, though mothers were usually given gifts on this day.

In addition to Mother's Day, International Women's Day is celebrated in many countries on March 8.

The "Mother's Day Proclamation" by Julia Ward Howe was one of the early calls to celebrate Mother's Day in the United States. Written in 1870, Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation was a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. The Proclamation was tied to Howe's feminist belief that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.

Spelling

The United States version of the Holiday can trace its origins back to 1912 when Anna Jarvis trademarked the phrases "second Sunday in May" and "Mother's Day", and created the Mother's Day International Association to continue the tradition of honoring mothers that had long been established in the United Kingdom where her ancestors originated.