Summary: The life of Ann Jarvis, the woman who inspired Mother’s Day, was filled with tragedies that illustrate the difficulties of motherhood in the past. With almost nonexistent prenatal care, only 4 of her 13 children reached adulthood. Learn more about the progress made in maternal and childhood health in this article by Chelsea Follett.

This article originally appeared in The Virginian‐​Pilot.

Few know the story of the woman who inspired Mother’s Day. Her name was Ann Jarvis, and the many tragedies in her life demonstrate how much more difficult motherhood was in the past and the progress that has been made since.

Ann was born in 1832 in Virginia, and married at age 18. After marrying, Ann had 13 children over the course of 17 years. In that era, prenatal care was almost nonexistent. During the 19th century, about 500 to 1,000 mothers died for every 100,000 births. Giving birth 13 times, as Ann did, meant that she faced between a 6 and 13 percent chance of death. Fortunately, she survived. Today, the maternal mortality rate, while still higher in poor countries than in rich ones, is falling—decreasing from 342 deaths per 100,000 live births in the year 2000 to 211 per 100,000 in 2017, the World Bank’s most recent year of data.

Children also faced fearful survival odds and were often killed by childhood ailments that are now preventable or treatable. Ann’s family was no exception: only four of her children lived to adulthood. Her children died of illnesses such as measles, typhoid, and diphtheria, which are now far less common thanks to vaccines and better sanitation. 

The grief of losing nine children is beyond the imagination of most people today. Ann faced better odds than her foremothers in this regard, although she fared worse than the statistical average. The average number of a mother’s children lost to premature death had fallen from three in 1800 to just two in 1850, the year that Ann wed. That figure fell to one child in 1900. Today, thankfully, childhood death is extraordinarily rare in developed countries, where most mothers can expect to see all of their children survive. That progress is ongoing, and has come about thanks to medical advances, improved sanitation, and rising prosperity to fund them—as well as the efforts of people like Ann.

In 1858, while she was pregnant with her sixth child, Ann began organizing women’s clubs with the goal of reducing childhood death. The clubs raised funds to buy medicine for local children, hired assistants for mothers suffering from tuberculosis, brought supplies to sick quarantining households to prevent the spread of disease, and more. “The clubs inspected food and milk for contamination—long before governments took on such tasks—and they visited homes to teach mothers how to improve sanitation. Ann became a popular speaker, addressing subjects [such as] ‘Great Value of Hygiene for Women and Children.’” 

Ann helped popularize the practice of boiling drinking water in her community, preventing cases of the often‐​deadly waterborne illnesses (such as tuberculosis and typhoid fever) that ravaged humanity before widespread chlorination.

Despite the demands of childrearing and her volunteer work on behalf of mothers and children, Ann also found time to organize efforts during the Civil War to treat wounded soldiers from both sides. A devout Methodist, Ann was also active in her religious community and taught Sunday School lessons.

Anna, one of Ann’s four children to make it to adulthood, created Mother’s Day in Ann’s honor. She was inspired by something Ann had said during Sunday School: “I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial ‘mother’s day’ commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life. She is entitled to it.” 

Given her tireless work to improve maternal and childhood health, Ann certainly deserves credit. This Mother’s Day, despite the problems that remain, take a moment to appreciate progress in the fight against premature death for mothers and their children.

Economic freedom and resulting competitive markets empower women in at least two interrelated ways.

First, market-led innovation has improved the lives of women even more so than for men. For example, women have reaped greater benefits from health advances financed by the prosperity created by free enterprise: female life expectancy has risen faster than men’s and today women outlive men almost everywhere. Women are also less likely to die in childbirth.

Labor-saving household devices have also freed women from the burden of housework. Thanks to time-saving kitchen appliances, in the United States cooking has gone from consuming the same hours as a full-time job, to taking up only around an hour a day. And thanks to laundry machines, in rich countries washing has gone from taking up a full day each week to less than two hours a week on average. This freeing of women’s time is ongoing as appliances spread throughout the world. Market competition and the profit motive incentivized the invention of labor-saving household devices and continue to motivate their ongoing marketing to new customers in developing countries. Countries that liberalize their economies often see rapid economic progress, including more households able to afford modern conveniences. China’s economy has grown dramatically since it adopted policies of greater economic freedom in 1978. In 1981, less than 10 percent of urban Chinese households had a washing machine. By 2011, over 97 percent did. As women spend less time on household chores, more choose to engage in paid labor.

Second, labor market participation offers women economic independence and heightened societal bargaining power. Factory work, despite its poor reputation, empowered women in the 19th century United States by helping them achieve economic independence and social change. It also softened attitudes about women engaging in paid labor. Today, the same process is repeating in the developing countries.

Consider China and Bangladesh. In China, factory work gave rural women a chance to escape the dire poverty and restrictive gender roles of their home villages and has dramatically slashed the suicide rate among young rural-born Chinese women, once among the highest in the world. Social mobility is high and most economic migrants never return permanently to the countryside: they settle in their adopted cities or eventually move to towns near their home villages and set up stores, restaurants or small businesses like hairdressing salons or tailoring shops. Many become white-collar workers. Very few go back to farming. Similarly, in Bangladesh factory work let women renegotiate restrictive cultural norms. The country’s women-dominated garment industry transformed the norm of purdah, or seclusion, that traditionally prevented women from working beyond the home, walking outside unaccompanied by a male guardian, or even speaking in the presence of unrelated men. Today, in Dhaka and other industrial cities, women walk outside and interact with unrelated men. Research by social economist Naila Kabeer of the London School of Economics found that “the decision to take up factory work was largely initiated by the women themselves, often in the face of considerable resistance from other family members.” Tragedies like the Rana Plaza building collapse garner a lot of press, but the garment industry’s wider-reaching effects on the material wellbeing and social equality of women in Bangladesh receive less attention. The same applies to other industrializing countries.

By freeing women’s time from household drudgery and offering women the economic bargaining power that comes with new employment opportunities, markets heighten women’s material standard of living and foster cultural change. Women’s empowerment in many developing countries is in its early phases, but the right policies can set women everywhere on a path toward the same prosperity and freedom enjoyed by women in today’s wealthy countries.

This first appeared in Apple News and in Quora.