When Mother’s Day Is ‘Empowering’ – The Atlantic

Mothers Day was created when, in 1908, Anna Jarvis invented the holiday as a gesture to honor her own mother. Her idea caught on quickly: By 1914, in large part because of a campaign Jarvis waged to have her celebration of motherhood more widely recognized, Congress gave the day status as an official national holiday. Companies, as they do, did their part to further institutionalize Mothers Day, marketing flowers and candies and greeting cards as the proper ways to celebrate Mom.

Soon, Jarvis came to regret the holiday she had put on the American calendar. In 1920, she wrote a press release declaring florists and greeting card manufacturers to be charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations. And, as Nicole Russell wrote in The Atlantic in 2013, she spent the rest of her life trying to abolish the holiday she founded. This time, of course, Jarviss powers of persuasion failed her. Mothers Day would remainnot just a Hallmark holiday, but a Teleflora one.

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I thought of Jarvis when I saw, on Amazon, the section of that massive marketplace that is currently devoted to Mothers Day. The section, backgrounded in pastel pink and decorated at the edges with origami roses rendered in muted corals, offers in one way pretty much the stuff youd expect a Mothers Day-devoted page to put on display: gadgets organized under headings like Food & Kitchen, Style, Spa Days, Creative Hobbies. Commercial goods that range from the practical to the whimsical and that are, all in all, pretty much the stuff of Jarvisian nightmare.

Amazons Mothers Day offerings, however, contain a newer addition to the traditional gift selections: a section claiming to offer Empowering Keepsakesfor the mom, the section explains, who loves feeling inspired. Empowering Keepsakes links to items on offer at Amazons Girl Power and Sorry Not Sorry boutiques; through them, you can order Mom a hardcover copy of Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In, or a silver necklace with fearless etched in a pendant, or a Rosie the Riveter cuff bracelet, or a plastic iPhone cover scrawled with the intriguingly punctuated phrase im not Bossy im The Boss, or a mug printed with an all-caps reminder to GET IT GIRL. You can order your mother, basically, some cheerfully commercialized feminism.

Its an old story that feminism itself has been co-opted by consumerism (you can buy that book on Amazon, too, for $16.06 plus shipping); here, though, through Amazons massive online marketplace, is an everyday reminder of that co-optation, rendered in mugs and mousepads and slim-fit t-shirts with BELIEVE IN YOURSELF silkscreened onto their surfaces. Here is Empowerment, transformed into a Keepsake. Empowerment got its start, as a political ethos, in the social work of the American 1970sa term meant to encourage marginalized communities to fight against paternalism, in the ways they saw fit for themselves; in the early 1980s, Jia Tolentino notes in The New York Times, the psychologist Julian Rappaport broadened it into a political theory of power that viewed personal competency as fundamentally limitlessone that placed faith in the individual and laid at her feet a corresponding amount of responsibility too.

Compare that to Empowering Keepsakes, which is not at all about moral libertarianism and only in the most superficial sense about power, personal or otherwise, at all. Amazon is selling its Empowering Keepsakes against a political backdrop of wage disparities, rampant misogyny, and structural forces that make it exceedingly difficult for all women, mothers or not, to GET IT GIRL.

The rhetoric of commercialized empowerment is also striking in the context of Mothers Day itself, which is not merely a celebration of motherhood, but which is also coded as a celebration of extremely traditional femininity. There are the pinks and the petunias, yes, but there are also the (slightly) subtler genderings: the fact, say, that Food Networks advice on throwing the perfect Mothers Day brunch involves recipes for light frittatas and sweet baked goods, while its Fathers Day offerings will inevitably involve tips for grilling cuts of manly meat. As Jill Filipovic points out in her book The H-Spot, the association of light food with women, and of substantial food with men, has a long historywith, among other things, smaller-is-better assumptions about womens bodies, and notions that women, as the weaker sex, should save the meat for the strong men and growing kids while they make do with whats left over.

Theres nothing wrong with an omelette, of course. But taken together, the commercialized offerings of Mothers Day suggest how conflicted American culture remains when it comes to feminism, and motherhood, and womanhood itself. Mothers Day, as observed in 2017, remains, technically, what it was back in 1914: a celebration of motherhood, its joys, its sacrifices. In practice, however, the holiday functions much as Valentines Day does, as a commercialized endorsement of traditional femininity. All those flowers. All that chocolate. All that Food & Kitchen. All that pink.

And: All that money. The Baltimore Sun, examining data from the National Retail Federation, reports that Mothers Day now ranks third out of all yearly holidays when it comes to consumer spendingjust below the Christmas/Hanukkah celebrations and the fall back-to-school season. (And just above Valentines Day.) This year should be a record-breaking one for Mothers Day spending: American shoppers are expected to spend around $186 on average on the mothers in their lives, for a total of nearly $24 billion nationally. Some of those billions will be devoted to gifts that profess to celebrate womens empowermentall in a political and economic environment that finds womens actual power to be under threat. Anna Jarvis, on some level, realized what shed started; she simply realized it too late.

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When Mother's Day Is 'Empowering' - The Atlantic