Anna Jarvis Gave Us Mother’s Day—and this is how we repaid her?!

Anna Jarvis Gave Us Mother’s Day—and this is how we repaid her?!

Societies have celebrated mothers at various dates and times throughout history. The Greeks and Romans celebrated Rhea and Cybele, the mothers of their gods, in the spring, as yearly growth and renewal abounded in the natural world around them. Western Europeans celebrated mothers on the fourth Sunday of Lent. They even embarked on pilgrimages and returned to their “mother churches” for the occasion.

As we now know it, Mother’s Day was proclaimed to be a national holiday in the US by President Woodrow Wilson in May 1914, when he officially announced that the second Sunday of May would henceforth be celebrated as Mother’s Day. In observance, government buildings and citizens displayed the national flag to show respect for mothers who had lost sons in the service of the nation.

In the decades prior to Wilson’s proclamation, as the practice spread in and around Pennsylvania, churchgoers would wear carnations in honor of their mothers. White carnations were worn if their mother was deceased, and red or pink carnations if she was still living. Anna Jarvis is widely credited for the effort culminating in Wilson’s proclamation. She petitioned priests, businessmen, and politicians to create a holiday observing the role mothers have in society.

Her desire for such a holiday arose from the respect she had for her own mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis (9/30/1832-5/9/1905). Ann lived in the Appalachian region of West Virginia during the Civil War. When Virginia seceded from the Union, West Virginia seceded from Virginia, opting to create a new state rather than leave the Union.

The people of West Virginia though, were sharply divided on the matter and men from the same towns and families fought for both the Union and the Confederacy. Amidst this turmoil, Ann created women’s groups to treat casualties from both sides, and after the war, she worked to bring mothers from both sides together to encourage healing and community reunification.

Prior to the war, Ann gave birth to eleven children, but only four survived to adulthood. This inspired Ann to organize work clubs for mothers in her town and in towns nearby to improve health and sanitation practices in an effort to reduce the infant mortality rate. These clubs educated women in the area on proper dietary needs and overall cleanliness, inspected bottled milk and foods for pathogens, and distributed medicine to expectant mothers. The women in these clubs were from the Union and the Confederacy, and they vowed to maintain their mission and their internal peace despite the conflict happening all around them.

After the war ended, Ann began an annual “mother’s friendship day” celebration with families from both the Union and the Confederacy gathering together to promote peace even though tensions were still high and further violence still seemed quite possible. These gatherings were successful, and carried on for several years during post-war reconstruction. When Ann died at the age of 72, the church in her town of Grafton rang its bell 72 times in her honor.

Inspired by the legacy her mother had created, Anna Maria Jarvis began writing letters to clergy, politicians, journalists, and executives advocating for mothers to be recognized with a national holiday. Eventually her efforts gained momentum. President Wilson even gave his mother’s day announcement on the anniversary of the day Anna lost her mother.

As the popularity of the holiday spread year by year, Anna despised how commercialized the holiday became. By 1922, she was publicly boycotting florists and speaking out against greeting card companies. She saw companies profiting from Mother’s Day as antithetical to its spirit. She called them “trade vandals” and “copyright infringers.”

By 1930, efforts began in New York to replace Mother’s Day with Parent’s Day because men were more than just breadwinners. Those efforts didn’t catch on, probably because in that era, women often spent more time in the home.

Anna considered Mother’s Day to be her intellectual and legal property and fought against the growing commercialization of the holiday. By the time she was 80 years old, Anna purportedly had 33 pending lawsuits against companies that were using the pluralized “mothers’ day” to sidestep her claim on the phrase “Second Sunday in May, Mother’s Day”. Anna died in 1948 of heart failure in a sanitarium in Pennsylvania. She was unmarried and had no children. It is rumored that the same greeting card companies and florists she fought against had quietly paid her bills until the end.

In the US, Mother’s Day is May 11th this year. Don’t forget to call your mother—and if you do forget to send a card or flowers, tell her it is what Anna Jarvis would have wanted.