It's the Brian Laro show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone.

Before we leave Mother's Day behind for a lot of wilting flowers and binging on chocolates, I want to read

a few lines from the historian Heather Cox Richardson, who writes that excellent and widely read

substack newsletter about how what most people don't know about the origins of the holiday

should, in her opinion, be more widely known before we get to

Heather Cox, Richard, before we get to Kimberly Crenshaw this hour, and also Jessica Gross,

who has another take on Mother's Day at the end of the show. But here's what Heather Cox-Richardson

wants us to know about the history of Mother's Day.

She writes, if you Google the history of Mother's Day, the Internet will tell you that Mother's Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother.

But Mother's Day, with the apostrophe, not in the singular spot, but in the plural.

So think about that for a minute, right? We think of Mother's Day, Mother apostrophe S. But Heather Cox Richardson says it was originally Mother's plural

apostrophe, Mother's Day, with the apostrophe, not in the singular spot, but in the plural, actually started in the

1870s when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War

convinced writer and reformer Julia Ward Howe that women must take control of politics from the men

who had permitted such carnage. Mother's Day was not

designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women's effort to gain

power to change society. Just a few more lines. The Civil War years taught naive Americans what

mass death meant in the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of heroism

discovered that newly invented long-range weapons turned death into tortured anonymity.

Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches,

or withered into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives away.

I think very useful graphic description of war that people need to hear things like that every

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