The Mom Evolution

Today is Mother's Day! Yeaaa... What a great day!... thanks to Anna Jarvis who conceived the idea in 1907 to celebrate her own mother who had passed away.

My own son is 16 now. He's finishing his junior year of high school and keeps so very busy through the week with advanced classes and meetings and sports, that on weekends he really needs his sleep, so we celebrated Mother's Day last night with dinner out and a movie of my choice for a change, although, I picked something I knew he would enjoy too. He'll sleep in this morning and then get up to study for another A.P. test he has this week in Chemistry, so I decided to write - one of my favorite past times.

I became curious about Mother's Day and thought it would be nice to look into it further and learned about Anna. Anna was born on May 1, 1864 near Grafton, West Virginia. Anna's mother, Ann Jarvis, worked hard to provide nursing care and promote better sanitation during the war years, that helped save thousands of lives on both sides of the war (the full story can be seen here ). Ann Jarvis passed away on the second Sunday of May in 1905, and in 1907, Anna had friends over on the second Sunday of May to commemorate her mother and announced her idea for Mother's Day.

However, while this was the official beginning of Mother's Day in the U.S., this was not the beginning of motherhood... Today, being a mom is filled with so many roles for mom's to fill, that it would be hard to describe to someone what exactly a mom is and what she does. We love our children with all our hearts, and want them to grow into the best people they can be, and that includes caring for them when they're sick, even when we're on our knees wiping up vomit from off the floor muttering under our breath about the stench of it. It includes running them to their soccer games and dance practices like an insane person without a life of her own, all the while assuring her reluctant child to attend one more event that this is for his or her own good. It includes smiling and listening along with them to their hard rock music as if we enjoy it with them, the whole time thinking how we're going to cunningly eliminate this piece of music from our child's repertoire should it prove to have lyrics that are too harmful for their ears - or worse, for ours.

Yes, motherhood today is very involved and while we super mom's run around from our full-time careers to our child's events and school and practices, paying out the ear for all they need, the mom's of the past didn't have it too differently than us...

Prehistoric Mothers


When we think of prehistoric days, most conjure up visions of men hunting and the women at home in caves waiting or waiting by fires for the men to return, yet, research tells us a different story. The mothers of this time not only cared for their children and home spaces (if you can call what they moved in and out of constantly homes) but they, along with the children, helped the men hunt and would herd animals into waiting nets made by the women. They selected their men mates, and they made the hunting tools. The Inuit women hunted with bows and arrows. The Aborigines in Australia were expected to hunt, it was considered women's work. I think I'll think twice before complaining about my extra trips to the store for items for dinner from now on...

Mothers in Ancient Rome

Fast forward to the "more evolved" women and mothers of ancient Rome, and what happens? We lost all of our rights... The concept that men have always been the hunters prevailed and was used to bar women from citizenship and voting or even owning property. The women of this time were married mostly for the sole purpose of bearing children to their husbands, and were expected to remain in the home to take care of the home and the children while the men were gone most of the time. The men spent their time at work and in the companionship of other men and women, leaving the mothers at home alone. And when a child was born, the mother was told how to rear the child by the mother-in-law. Well, hey, don't blame the mother-in-law... She was once a mother without any rights too, just longing for this day when her own son would bring home someone she could boss around and thereby gain some little sense of control for herself. Hmmm...wonder if this was the beginning of "mother-in-law" problems?...

Mothers in the Founding Colonies

From here, you would think we women had arrived when we came to America. We were coming to a land of opportunity and freedom, right?... Hmmm...that didn't come along until much later. First we had to work miracles with the uncultivated and unfertile land and cause it to produce food for our families and so much more. The mothers at this time stayed home to care for their children and the home, and run the family farm while the husband was away for much of the time.

Mothers of the Suffrage Period

Ah...and along came women's rights. Women's right to vote was first seriously proposed by Elizabeth Stanton in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention organized by Stanton. But Finland was the first nation in the world to award full suffrage in 1906. Voting rights were awarded to women in the U.S. in 1920, and the U.N. gave the right to women to vote by adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It was during this time, women were finally able to attend college and were feeling the freedom of being able to leave their homes more. About this same time, industry came along and gave us the ability to own machines to do household chores for us, sanitary napkins to give us more mobility, and cars to drive from place to place...

Thus began all our "freedoms" and so then evolved the... "its a bird... its a plane... No, it's Super-mom! Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive able to leap tall buildings in a single bound."... Mom's were now able to do everything including still run the home...be it drive the kids to school on the way to her work, run errands on her lunch break, and attend the kids' games after work to rush home and prepare dinner and yet attend night classes too - you name it!... She's now "free" to do everything!

Excuse me, I need to go fix breakfast for my son and finish the laundry, and...

If you're a busy mom like me (even if you're not) and would like to save yourself some time and earn some money in the process, visit this site: http://1-year-plan.com
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Adovasio, J.M., Soffer, O., & Page, J. (2007). THE INVISIBLE SEX: Uncovering the True Roles of women in Prehistory. Science News, 171(16), 250-255.

DeVito, A. (2009). Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Canadian Journal of History, 44(2), 287-288.

Laurel, G. (1997). New & Noteworthy Paperbacks: Founding Mothers and Fathers. New York Times Book Review, 36.

Rivers, C. The Perfect Gift For Prehistoric Mom: A Spear.

White House - First Ladies