Mother’s Day or Mothers’ Day?; The Power of the Apostrophe

Apostrophe on Mother’s Day and Mothers’ Day: Endowing the peacock with a shift in perception. The apostrophe is a punctuation mark of several uses. One signifies the possessive case of nouns.

The apostrophe is also a trope of rhetoric. One speaks directly to someone who is not present or is dead or speaks to an inanimate object.

Apostrophe and the possessive case: Mother’s Day.

The first Mother’s Day was celebrated in 1907. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed May 9, 1914, the first Mother’s Day. He asked Americans on that day to give a public “thank you” to their mothers. The apostrophe in Mother’s Day tells the world that the day is about my mother. On Mother’s Day (at least when I was a little girl), mothers wore either a red or white carnation to signify whether their mother was alive or dead. The carnation on Mother’s Day is about honoring or remembering “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” said Anna Jarvis, who changed the apostrophe and founded Mother’s Day.

Apostrophe and the rhetorical trope: The peacock addresses Mothers’ Day.

Mothers’ Day speaks directly to what women did for men who were wounded and lay dying during the Civil War. Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the lyrics for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” apostrophized “A Mothers’ Day” to advocate peace doctrines. This day was celebrated June 2, 1870, in New York, Philadelphia, New Haven, Chicago, Rome, and Constantinople (Istanbul). Howe wrote, “My dream was a mighty and august Congress of Mothers, which should constitute a new point of departure for the regeneration of society by the elimination of the selfish and brutal elements which lead to war and bloodshed.”

Howe was a suffragist. Her dream of Congress of Mothers in 1870 was a response to the exclusion of all African American and white women from the Fifteenth Amendment that gave African American and white men the right to vote. (Though the Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, granted all men the right to vote regardless of race, it wasn't until the Snyder Act in 1925 that Native Americans could enjoy the rights granted by this amendment.) Howe supported the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because she wanted African American men to have the right to vote. However, in 1870, Howe turned away from the laws that denied her rights on account of her sex and exclaimed Mothers’ Day as a time to promote women’s rights. “When I hear that the mothers of Wyoming and of the Washington Territory take their young children with them to the polls …” she followed her hypotheses of motherhood to the verge of a new world. If African American and white women had the right to vote, the world would turn toward justice. In the meantime, they were Mothers’ Day to lead the cause.

Mother’s Day or Mothers’ Day? Oh! What a difference an apostrophe makes.