Mother’s Day was never meant to be about brunch reservations, flower markups, or a pastel‑washed corporate marketing bonanza cashing in on sentimentality.

It was born from civil resistance.

From women organizing for public health in Appalachian coal towns. From mothers demanding peace in the aftermath of war. From abolitionists insisting that human dignity mattered more than profit. From women who understood that care work is political work.

And yet, here we are in 2026: a nation expected to spend tens of billions celebrating “Mother’s Day” while the same corporate forces profiting from the holiday bankroll war, poison communities, strip healthcare, exploit workers, and attack bodily autonomy.

That’s not a coincidence.

It’s corporate rule.

Today marks not only Mother’s Day, but also another anniversary, one that explains how corporations got the power to twist everything, even Mother’s Day itself, into a profit center: May 10, 1886, the day the Supreme Court handed down Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the ruling that birthed the legal fiction of corporate personhood.

Not in the opinion, mind you. In the headnotes. Marginalia written by a court reporter, not the Court, declared that corporations were entitled to 14th Amendment “equal protection” rights, an amendment written to defend formerly enslaved people. Justice Hugo Black laid it bare: for 50 years after its passage, fewer than 0.5% of 14th‑Amendment cases protected Black Americans, while more than 50% protected corporations.

Human beings fought for rights.
Corporations hijacked them.

That theft echoes everywhere today.

That one maneuver: treating property as a person, unleashed every social justice issue we hold dear:
• weapons manufacturers fueling endless war
• fossil fuel giants torching the planet
• insurance and pharmaceutical corporations smothering Medicare for All
• corporate “speech” overriding public safety
• corporate “privacy” blocking inspections of dangerous facilities
• corporate “takings rights” used to attack environmental and labor protections

And politicians drowning in corporate money unleashed through decisions like Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission tell us this is simply how democracy works.

And all of it rests on a foundation built 140 years ago, in a tax case distorted into constitutional dogma.

It isn’t democracy.

It’s legalized corporate supremacy.

The women who launched Mother’s Day would recognize it immediately.

Ann Jarvis organized mothers to improve sanitation and public health because corporations and political elites were failing working families.

Julia Ward Howe issued a Mother’s Day Proclamation calling on women to rise up against war, injustice, and inequality.

And Anna Jarvis — the woman who fought to establish the official holiday — spent her later years furious that corporations had transformed it into a distorted commercial racket. She was even arrested protesting profiteers exploiting Mother’s Day for money.

She called them:
“charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites.”

She was right.

Today, corporations market “empowerment” while funding politicians who control women’s bodies.
They sell “self-care” while opposing universal healthcare.
They celebrate mothers in ad campaigns while denying workers paid leave and living wages.

Move to Amend refuses to accept this contradiction.

Move to Amend was founded by women who understood that until we overturn this constitutional fraud, every other path to justice is uphill. Corporate rights always come at the expense of human rights, especially for women who bear the brunt of economic inequality, environmental destruction, and the erosion of democracy.

As feminists, organizers, mothers, daughters, caregivers, and human beings, we cannot allow corporate “persons” to keep dictating the terms of our lives, our bodies, our healthcare, our wages, our communities, our climate.

Because when corporations gain constitutional power, real people lose power.

Women lose bodily autonomy.
Workers lose protections.
Communities lose clean water.
Families lose education and housing security.
Democracy loses meaning.

The We the People Amendment exists because reforms alone cannot fix a system built on the lie that corporations are people and money is speech.

Slavery was the legal fiction that human beings could be property.
Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property can be a person.

Both are lies.

This Mother’s Day, we honor the fierce foremothers who refused to accept war, disease, or injustice as inevitable. We honor their strength “the secret in our culture,” as Laura Stavoe Harm wrote, “is not that birth is painful. It’s that women are strong.”

So let’s channel that strength.

The We the People Amendment (HJR 54) is the only amendment that fully abolishes corporate constitutional rights. We need more co‑sponsors. We need more pressure. We need more people refusing to accept the legal fiction that property is a person.

Honor the women who organized.
Who resisted.
Who demanded peace.
Who challenged concentrated power.
Who refused to accept exploitation as inevitable.

And then ask yourself:

What would happen if we finally ended constitutional rights for corporations?
What would become possible if democracy belonged to people instead of concentrated wealth?

The answer is why we organize.

Arise, women of this day.
Arise, everyone who still believes democracy should belong to human beings.

The best way to honor mothers is to organize for the future our children deserve.

In love and solidarity,
The Move to Amend National Team