The fact that maternal love blinds us is a fact that can be admired anew every day. How else can you explain what the child warriors endure in terms of impositions: that they can't sleep through the night for years, endure Simone Sommerland's songs for hours and parents' evenings on miniature chairs.

This is probably one of the reasons why it is also the mothers who vehemently participate in the discussion about the weal and woe of the day of honour intended for them, which reliably breaks out every year in May. They may still accept the crooked heart in the daycare center as a thank you for all the exertions throughout the year, see above, but the flower and chocolate?

Childbirth-person-day?

Before the Day of Honour Rescue is renamed Parents' Day or Giving Birth Day – the discussion about this is in full swing – it would be better to abolish it immediately. Especially since the criticism of it is as old as Mother's Day itself, which, as is well known, goes back neither to the cut flower lobby nor to völkisch circles, but to a childless feminist from West Virginia, whose idea was culturally appropriated by the gift industry at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Florists were the first to jump on the Mother's Day bandwagon, followed by Swiss chocolate merchants, American kitchen appliance manufacturers and German Nazis. With her proposal, Anna Jarvis pursued the political goals of the women's movement of the time, to which her mother had belonged, before others turned the day to their concerns.

Anna Jarvis was so horrified by this that the suffragette fought fiercely against the excesses of her invention and finally wanted to abolish the day she had founded. Because she did not want to appreciate the noble, sacrificial image of the mother, but to strengthen the social and political role of women in society.

The inventor was thrown into prison

The business world, however, seized the opportunity to escape the spring doldrums with the new gift occasion day. And while the first Mother's Day was celebrated in this country 100 years ago, its inventor was put in prison in America in the same year because she had publicly polemicized against abuse.

Anna Jarvis still led countless lawsuits against the flower industry. But she could not save her project from commercialization. In the end, she lost her entire fortune and died impoverished and forgotten in a retirement home in 1948. She never knew that her place there was paid for by the florists' guild, those against whom she had fought all her life, because she saw her feminist idea discredited by them.

With the abolition of Mother's Day, not only would Anna Jarvis receive late justice. It would also eliminate a contradiction that was recognized more than a hundred years ago.