Designing Devotion: The Art and History of Mother’s Day

Each spring, as blossoms return and sunlight lengthens, a quieter ritual of renewal unfolds. Breakfast trays are prepared, cards are inscribed in careful hands, and flowers—daffodils, carnations, tulips—find their way to kitchen tables and mantelpieces. Mother’s Day, a celebration of love, gratitude, and domestic care, may seem timeless, but its story—woven through religion, reform, art, and design—is a surprisingly modern invention.

From ancient festivals to the sentimental crafts of the Victorians, from wartime propaganda to pastel greeting cards, Mother’s Day charts not just the evolution of family feeling, but the artistry through which societies have expressed devotion itself.

I. Mater Matuta and the Ancient Origins of Motherhood Rituals

Long before the words “Mother’s Day” were first printed on a card, civilizations across the ancient world honoured the maternal divine.

In ancient Greece, festivals for Rhea—the mother of the gods—marked the cycle of fertility and creation. In Rome, the Matronalia celebrated Juno Lucina, goddess of childbirth, with offerings of flowers and gifts exchanged between husbands and wives.

These rituals, half domestic, half divine, entwined motherhood with ideas of nature, renewal, and the rhythm of the earth. To honour the mother was to honour life itself.

Centuries later, this association between the maternal and the cyclical would resurface in the Christian calendar, transformed by theology but rooted in the same ancient impulse: reverence for the one who gives life.

II. “Mothering Sunday”: A Medieval Return Home

In medieval England, the fourth Sunday of Lent was known as Mothering Sunday—a day when people returned to their “mother church,” the main cathedral or parish of their region. Apprentices and servants were given leave to visit their families, often bringing small gifts or a simnel cake, a fruitcake decorated with marzipan.

Over time, the religious observance softened into a domestic one. The journey home became an act of filial love, and “mothering” began to mean not only the church that nurtured faith, but the women who nurtured life.

It was an early expression of the English sentimental tradition—ritual as design, where gesture, object, and devotion intertwined. In this way, Mothering Sunday became a prototype for the modern Mother’s Day: less about worship, more about affection.

III. The Victorian Ideal: Domesticity as Art

Nowhere was motherhood more idealized—and aestheticized—than in the Victorian age.

The cult of domesticity cast the mother as the moral and emotional centre of the home: pious, nurturing, self-sacrificing. Artists and designers from George Elgar Hicks to William Morris celebrated the household as a space of moral beauty, where craftsmanship mirrored care.

Motherhood was also commercialized. Illustrated magazines, embroidery patterns, and household goods propagated an image of the ideal mother as both muse and manager—a curator of the domestic arts.

The exchange of small tokens—embroidered handkerchiefs, framed samplers, or pressed flowers—became a language of gratitude. Many of these intimate, handcrafted items now reside in the V&A’s textile and decorative arts collections, quiet witnesses to the Victorian belief that love could be materialized through making.

IV. The American Revival: Anna Jarvis and the Birth of a Modern Holiday

The Mother’s Day we know today owes its existence to a daughter’s devotion and a letter-writing campaign.

In 1908, Anna Jarvis of West Virginia held a memorial service for her late mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, a social reformer who had organized “Mothers’ Work Clubs” to support public health during the American Civil War. Anna envisioned a national day to honour mothers’ sacrifices—an annual reminder of love’s moral force.

By 1914, President Woodrow Wilson had declared Mother’s Day an official U.S. holiday. The carnation—white for remembrance, pink for living mothers—became its emblem.

Ironically, Jarvis would later condemn the holiday’s commercialization, railing against florists and greeting-card companies for exploiting sentiment. Yet her campaign had already succeeded too well: Mother’s Day had entered the modern calendar, entwined forever with commerce, emotion, and design.

V. The Art of Affection: From Handcraft to Hallmark

By the early 20th century, Mother’s Day had crossed the Atlantic, embraced by both British and Commonwealth cultures.

Its symbols—flowers, cards, and modest gifts—drew heavily on Victorian traditions of sentimental design. Early greeting cards, produced by firms like Raphael Tuck & Sons, featured hand-tinted chromolithographs: vases of roses, tender verses, and soft pastel frames.

During the World Wars, the holiday carried new resonance. Soldiers sent Mother’s Day cards from the front—delicate embroidered postcards, sometimes stitched with “To My Dear Mother,” combining military pride with filial affection. These fragile artefacts, many preserved in museum collections, show how design mediates distance: art as a bridge between absence and presence.

By mid-century, the mass-produced Mother’s Day card had become a staple of the domestic calendar. Its imagery—cup-and-saucer gentility, floral motifs, gentle script—reflected not just sentiment, but social aspiration: the aesthetics of comfort and care.

VI. Motherhood in Modern Design: Beyond Sentiment

In the late 20th century, artists and designers began to reimagine motherhood beyond its sentimental frame.

Photographers such as Sally Mann and Carrie Mae Weems explored the complexities of maternal identity—love and labour, intimacy and independence. Designers like Ray Eames blurred the boundary between home and studio, merging domestic life with modernist creativity.

Even in graphic design, the iconography of motherhood evolved. Advertising of the 1950s idealized maternal perfection; by the 1970s, feminist art reclaimed the mother figure as both creator and critic.

In the V&A’s modern collections, objects like Lucie Rie’s ceramics or Anni Albers’ textiles remind us that care and craftsmanship are entwined. Making, like mothering, is an act of patience, repetition, and quiet transformation.

VII. Digital Motherhood: Screens, Stories, and Shared Love

Today, Mother’s Day unfolds as both ritual and algorithm. Social media timelines bloom with images of breakfast trays and bouquets; hashtags (#ThanksMum, #母親節快樂) replace handwritten notes.

Yet even in its digital form, the impulse remains unchanged: to design gratitude, to make love visible through image and gesture. The selfie, the story post, the online florist checkout—all continue the lineage of handcrafted devotion, translated into pixels and screens.

Museums now archive not only physical cards but digital artefacts—proof that our culture still seeks material ways to express care, even in the immaterial age.

VIII. The Museum of Care

In the galleries of the V&A, objects that once belonged to the domestic realm—teapots, quilts, embroidery, letters—speak of motherhood not as an ideal, but as lived experience.

A 19th-century sampler stitched with the words “Home Sweet Home.” A ceramic teacup inscribed “A Present for Mother.” A handwritten recipe book passed down through generations. Each is a small act of memory, a design of affection.

Together, they form a material archive of care: a record of how love takes shape in the things we make and keep.

Mother’s Day, viewed through this lens, is not merely a celebration but a curatorial act. It is the annual exhibition of tenderness—the day we honour the artistry of nurture itself.

IX. Designing Gratitude

The history of Mother’s Day reveals that gratitude, like love, is always a designed emotion. From sacred offerings to scented cards, from lacework to hashtags, every era has crafted its own language of thanks.

Whether made by hand or printed by machine, each gesture of appreciation carries within it the same impulse: to acknowledge care by creating beauty.

To celebrate Mother’s Day, then, is to engage in one of humanity’s oldest arts—the art of giving shape to affection.

And as we arrange flowers, sign cards, or tap the digital heart, we continue an ancient tradition: making the invisible labour of love visible again.