May 9, 1914 and 1960: Mother's Day and Margaret Sanger
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “mother” as “the female parent of a human being; a woman in relation to a child to whom she has given birth; a woman who undertakes the responsibilities of a parent.” As a verb, “to mother” is to nurture and protect.
There are many variations: stepmother, foster mother, surrogate mother, birth mother, expectant mother, single mother, unwed mother, den mother, earth mother, queen mother, mother superior, stay-at-home, working, and more recently, soccer moms and grizzly mamas.
Despite the life-giving meaning of motherhood, women as the mothers of the universe appear only in Native American creation myths. In Judeo-Christian tradition, childbirth was Eve’s punishment. For millennia, giving birth was painful, exhausting, life threatening, and frequently involuntary. As the “weaker sex,” women were more often possessions than partners.
Yet the survival of the species depended on mothers. As human beings evolved from nomadic hunter-gatherers into herders and farmers, sperm donors wanted to own offspring in the same way they owned land. Patriarchy and primogeniture defined women in relationship to men.
The Mother of Jesus, a virgin, was revered. Other women were respected for their roles as abbesses, healers or midwives, but in almost every civilization, women lacked legal standing and individual agency. Under British common law, which was transported to its colonies, neither free nor enslaved women had any rights to education, earnings, or property, including their bodies and their children.
By the mid 19th century, inspired by the abolition movement, women began resisting centuries of white male dominion. Without physical strength, income, or voting rights, they relied on the moral authority of motherhood, even if they were spinsters. White middle-class women existed in a separate, serene, domestic sphere, removed from male enterprise, politics, and war. Women used that assigned role to argue for social reform and suffrage, claiming that mothers had a wider responsibility for the community and the country.
The “mothers of the race” deserved the right to vote, needed to be protected from harsh working conditions, or had a stake in sanitation, public safety, and education. In 1838, Kentucky allowed white women who were single or widows, who owned property and paid taxes, to vote on school bonds and board members. Other states followed.
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, considered the first Black published feminist, was a graduate of Oberlin and the Sorbonne and the first female principal of the Washington, DC’s elite Black high school. A widow who fostered and adopted children, Cooper wrote in 1892 that women’s maternal roles empowered them with “self-authority [and] self-interest.”
Also writing in the 1890s, Charlotte Perkins Gilman asserted that motherhood risked women’s physical and mental health. Treated for hysteria and forbidden to read or write, like the heroine of her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman recovered after she abandoned her husband and child. In Women and Economics, she argued that women might manage in cooperative, female households, sharing domestic responsibilities, an idea activist Angela Davis revived in the 1970s.
Efforts to establish a Mother’s Day holiday date from this era. During the Civil War, when West Virginia split off to remain with the Union, Ann Reeves Jarvis treated soldiers on both sides. She bore thirteen children over seventeen years; four survived. After the war, she organized a “Mother’s Friendship Day, to unify families on both sides.
Ann Reeves Jarvis (1832-1905): photo credit Library of Congress
Her idea may have inspired her friend, Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In 1870 Howe called for an annual Mother’s Day for Peace, to bring women together to end war.
On May 9, 1914, President Wilson established the first Mother’s Day. Months later a world war exploded. The war would persuade Wilson, a reluctant suffragist, to support it as a war measure, acknowledging the contributions of women and the sacrifices of mothers.
Wilson had been lobbied by Ann Jarvis’s daughter. To honor her mother, Anna Jarvis, who never married or had children, proposed a national holiday on the second Sunday in May, the day her mother had died. Disdaining pre-printed cards, she urged children to write letters of gratitude to their mothers. In 1943, annoyed by the commercialization of Mother’s Day by florists and card companies, she petitioned to have it cancelled. Five years later she died in a sanitarium, penniless; her bills her paid by those same companies.
Meanwhile, maternal mortality in America soared. In 1920, the US ranked twentieth among twenty nations. The life expectancy of women in 1900 was forty-nine, the age at which Margaret Sanger’s mother had died in 1898. Anne Higgins and her husband were Irish immigrants. Over twenty-two years, she had eighteen pregnancies, eleven live births, and seven miscarriages.
Her sixth surviving child, Sanger trained as a nurse, married an architect, and had three children. Working in New York City’s slums in the 1910s, she treated women so desperate to limit pregnancies that they attempted self-abortions with coat hangers and knitting needles. Sanger believed access to contraception would end abortions and infanticide.
“Voluntary motherhood” was unrealistic. Refusing a husband’s conjugal rights was illegal. Few women used condoms, douches or sponges. Sex education was nonexistent. The Comstock Act, passed in May 1873, outlawed distribution of any materials deemed “obscene, lewd or lascivious” through the US mail. The ban covered information about contraception, venereal disease, even anatomy books.
That same law was invoked in March, to block access to mifepristone, the medical abortion pill, in oral arguments before the Supreme Court in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.
In 1914 Sanger was indicted under the Comstock Act. Rather than face a five-year felony sentence, she fled to Europe, abandoning her children. When she returned to await trial in 1915, her five-year-old daughter died. Eventually dropping the case, the US Attorney “refused to make [her] a martyr.”
Sanger remained controversial. She opened the first birth control clinic in the US, founded the American Birth Control League (renamed Planned Parenthood in 1942), and funded research for more effective methods. Based on her initiatives, on May 9, 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved sales of an oral contraceptive for two years. The Pill was available only to married women and only in some states. Overwhelming demand made limits impossible. By 1964, four million women, one-in-four married women, were “on the pill.”
Possibly a more significant scientific advance than the atomic bomb or the internet, the Pill transformed sexual relations and invigorated the women’s rights movement. It empowered women to defer pregnancy, limit family size, finish school, or enter the work force. It separated making love from making babies. Women could choose whether and when to become mothers.
The fertility rate is the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime. In the nineteenth century, the number was eight. Access to hygiene, medical care, education, and birth control reduced that number. The birthrate declined from 3.3 in 1920 to 2.0 in 1940. It soared during the Baby Boom, from 1946 to 1964, to over 3.5. Until 2024, the lowest rate had been 1.7 in 1979. This year it’s 1.6. Statistically, for the US population to replace itself (and fund Social Security), the rate would be 2.1.
In 2020, 86% of American women were mothers by age forty-four, with an average family size of 2.4 children. The proportion of women having “onlies” is increasing. Two cohorts of women have four or more children: women without a high school diploma and women with multiple degrees. Only 41% of Americans believe children are important to marital happiness; more households own dogs than have children.
Among the reasons for a declining birthrate are access to birth control; later marriage and a narrower window for fertility, possibly countered by IVF and surrogacy; economic insecurity; the “motherhood wage gap,” reducing their earning capacity; and lack of access to affordable childcare. According to the United Nations, the US is one seven countries globally that does not require paid leave for parents, joining the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papa New Guinea, and Tonga. Even countries with more family-friendly policies and more equitable gender roles have declining birthrates rates.
Today we can honor our mothers, support those women who hope to be mothers and those who do not, comfort mothers who have lost children, and consider how respect for motherhood might create bonds of empathy and action.
SOURCES:
Katharine Lane Antolini, Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day (West Virginia University Press, 2014).
Jean H. Baker, Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2011).
Dan Diamond, “As 1873 Law Could Threaten Abortion Access in the High Court,” Washington Post (March 27, 2024), https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/26/comstock-act-supreme-court-abortion-pill/
Jonathan Eig, The Birth of The Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2014).
Elisabeth Griffith, FORMIDABLE: American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920-2020 (Pegasus, 2022).
Sabrina Malhi, “Birthrates in the US Hit Historic Low, CDC Data Show,” Washington Post (April 26, 2024), https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/04/26/birth-rates-decline-cdc/
Elaine Showalter, The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe (Simon & Schuster, 2016).