RISMEDIA, May 11, 2007-Mother’s Day is Sunday, May 13. It originated in the United States when Ann Jarvis, organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors. When Jarvis died, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother’s Day was celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, on May 10, 1908.The holiday was declared officially by some states beginning in 1912. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother’s Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war. Nine years after the first official Mother’s Day holiday, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became rampant as Mother’s Day continues to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. holidays.
So while most mom’s will be spending the day with their families, we decided to take a closer look at what some famous figures have had to say about their mothers or being a mother:
– All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother. -Abraham Lincoln
– But a mother’s love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world’s condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy. – Washington Irving
– Men are what their mothers made them. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
– My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her. – George Washington
– Is my mother my friend? I would have to say, first of all she is my Mother, with a capital ‘M’; she’s something sacred to me. I love her dearly…yes, she is also a good friend, someone I can talk openly with if I want to. – Sophia Loren
– It seems to me that my mother was the most splendid woman I ever knew….I have met a lot of people knocking around the world since, but I have never met a more thoroughly refined woman than my mother. If I have amounted to anything, it will be due to her. – Charles Chaplin
– I love being a mother…I am more aware. I feel things on a deeper level. I have a kind of understanding about my body, about being a woman. – Shelley Long
– I saw pure love when my son looked at me, and I knew that I had to make a good life for the two of us…- Suzanne Somers
– She is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman – you do not know; as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain, and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us. – D H Lawrence
– If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much. – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
– “To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.” – Maya Angelou
– Children reinvent your world for you.- Susan Sarandon
– You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them. – Desmond Tutu
– As a parent you try to maintain a certain amount of control and so you have this tug-of-war … You have to learn when to let go. And that’s not easy. – Aretha Franklin
– My mother’s great. She has the major looks. She could stop you from doing anything, through a closed door even, with a single look. Without saying a word, she has that power to rip out your tonsils. – Whoopi Goldberg
Happy Mother’s Day!
Source: http://www.mothers.net/famousmothersquotes.htm and www.wikipedia.org.
