Did you know that the original “Mothers’ Day” began as an anti-war movement? Heather Cox Richardson writes that “”Mothers’ Day” with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia Ward Howe that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change society.”  To achieve that power, she also notes that it produced the movement in the US to get the vote for women.