Culture Junkie: The odd origins of Mother’s Day, and the woman who tried to abolish it

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This story ran last year, just before Mother’s Day. It was pretty good, and people seemed to like it, so this year, once again on the Eve of another Mother’s Day weekend, we are posting it for your pre-Sunday perusal. Enjoy.]

I like holidays.

In particular, I like the stories behind holidays. Some are so bizarre and unexpected, and often even a little tragic, that you’d be forgiven for suspecting a bit of exaggeration was involved.

One perfect example: Mother’s Day.

Now, personally, I have nothing against Mother’s Day. I’m genuinely sad I don’t get to send cards and flowers anymore to my own mother, Dianna Carlson, who died seven years ago. Or for that matter, my step-mother, Joan Templeton, who died last summer, or my mother-in-law, MaryEvelyn Panttaja, who died last April.

Aside from such nostalgic wistfulness when our mothers leave this world, there is very little that is not lovely and sweet about Mother’s Day. But the genesis of the holiday, and the unexpected aftermath of its invention, is actually pretty weird — and not at all what most people assume. As my mom would have said at the beginning of a story, stop me if you’ve already heard this one.

Let’s start with the short version.

Mother’s Day’s original founder, Anna Jarvis, died childless and penniless in a sanitarium after legally attempting to abolish the very holiday she’d worked for years to promote.

And the reason Jarvis had come to resent Mother’s Day so much?

Greeting card companies. And chocolate companies. And florists.

Jarvis believed such businesses had taken a holiday designed to strengthen family bonds and promote what she called “home life,” and commercialized it so fully and effectively that, to this day, most people assume that Mother’s Day was invented by the card companies and not a slightly obsessive heiress from West Virginia.

In truth, the holiday — with deep roots in early American feminism, activism, pacifism and abolitionism — was merely co-opted by such industries, who recognized a golden goose when they saw one. There is a surprising historical footnote (probably apocryphal) about how those card companies and florists ultimately responded to Jarvis’s anti-Mother’s Day efforts, and their possible involvement in certain details of her final years.

But first, a little additional background on how it all began, much of it covered in depth in “The Family in America: An Encyclopedia,” by Joseph M. Hawes and Elizabeth F. Shores, with additional details from “Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things.”

It was 113 years ago — on May 10, 1908 — that Jarvis first established Mother’s Day, largely in tribute to her own mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis. A trailblazing abolitionist and activist who’d founded an organization called Mother’s Day Work Clubs — created to combat appalling sanitation conditions in Union and Confederate camps during the Civil War — the elder Jarvis also attempted to establish a Mother’s Friendship Day. She saw it as a way to help bring divided families back together again after the war.

In 1870, around the time that Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis was engaged in that work, her abolitionist colleague Julia Ward Howe published a document titled “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World,” which later became known as the “Mother's Day Proclamation.” It called on all women, especially mothers (with a clear emphasis on religious women, Howe having been a committed Unitarian), to join forces to end warfare across the world.

One electrifying passage from the Mother’s Day Proclamation goes, “In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering.”

Ironically, Howe — who was quite famous at the time for her prominent pacifism and anti-slavery work — is also the composer of the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But in the aftermath of the Civil War, and in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War then underway in Europe — referred to in the her proclamation as “two great nations” having “exhausted themselves in mutual murder” — Howe rededicated herself to peace and justice. Believing strongly that it was the nation’s mothers who were grieving the deepest, she felt that mothers had the clearest motivation to put an end to war once and for all.

Jump ahead with me now to 1907, three years after the death of her mother, when Anna Jarvis oversaw a memorial service at St Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where she declared the day to be America’s first official Mother’s Day. The church building where it began has since become a national landmark, considered the birthplace of Mother’s Day, with a permanent International Mother’s Day Shrine on the premises.

Jarvis, who had no children of her own, saw Mother’s Day as a continuance of her own mother’s work, and that of Julia Ward Howe, but primarily as a way to remind children of the often overlooked significance of their own mothers dedication and love. Jarvis, in countless speeches delivered in churches and public forums over following few years, frequently referred to her audience member’s mothers as “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world."

Jarvis’ initial attempts at securing Mother’s Day as an official U.S. holiday failed spectacularly. In Charles Panati’s aforementioned 2014 book ”Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things,“ he describes a debate in Congress in 1908, in which Jarvis’ proposal was scoffed at, dismissed with a joke that if Mother’s Day was established, Congress would soon be called upon to approve Mother-in-Law’s Day, too. Gradually, though, as more and more people began celebrating the holiday unofficially, state after state began anointing various days in May as Mother’s Day. West Virginia was the first, in 1910. Four years later, in 1914, Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday, signing a proclamation that the second Sunday in May would be set aside as a national holiday honoring mothers.

One of the ways Jarvis hoped that sons and daughters would celebrate was by sending or delivering hand-written letters of love and appreciation to their mothers. The idea that one could instead purchase a manufactured card and a box of candy infuriated her. Though she inherited a decent fortune from her businessman father and taxi-company-owner brother, Jarvis eventually became so incensed at the commercialization of Mother’s Day that she started taking card companies and others to court, suing them for copyright infringement and anything else. On more than a few occasions, she was arrested for disturbing the peace, organizing boycotts and invading confectioners conventions.

By the end of her life, on Nov. 24, 1948, at the age of 80, Jarvis had long since run out of money, and had been in declining health for years, even while circulating a petition to have Mother’s Day permanently abolished in 1943. Her final five years were spent undergoing treatment at the high-end Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Rumors persist to this day that it was a group of executives from greeting card companies and professional flower growers who paid Jarvis’ hospital bills.

Whether that actually happened is under some doubt, but the story remains widely reported to this day. If it is true, no one knows if those companies paid for Jarvis’ care simply to keep her there (and out of their business), or out of a sense of gratitude for having founded what has become one of their most profitable annual paydays.

Which it is, we will likely never know for sure.

David Templeton’s “Culture Junkie“ runs every other week in the Argus-Courier. You can reach him at david.templeton@arguscourier.com.