The Almost Daily

It’s the second Sunday in May, and that means it’s Mothers’ Day!  The two women commonly credited with getting Mother’s Day recognized as a national holiday in the Untied States are Ann and Anna Jarvis, a mother and daughter respectively from Grafton, West Virginia.  Starting in the Civil War, the elder Jarvis organized “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” to equally care for wounded soldiers from both sides.  In 1905 when Mother Jarvis died, her daughter began a campaign to memorialize her life work. Legend has it that young Anna remembered a Sunday school lesson that her mother gave in which she said, "I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mother's day. There are many days for men, but none for mothers." 

In 1907, Jarvis was content to hold a private memorial for her mother, but the following year, the younger Jarvis organized a service honoring mothers in general at the Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, which was attended by over 400 mothers and their children.  Since then, the church has been designated as a National Historic Landmark, having “become the International Mother's Day Shrine.”

With the eventual financial support of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, John Wanamaker, who saw the marketing potential from the start, Jarvis was able to bring her cause to the attention of national lawmakers, including both Presidents Taft and Teddy Roosevelt.  It was Woodrow Wilson in 1913 who declared Mother’s Day a national holiday.  Since then, Mother’s Day has become the most popular day of the year to eat out, and that day also marks the heaviest traffic on telephone networks as children across America call their mothers.

Ironically, to say the least, Jarvis spent the later years of her life lobbying in vain for the abolition of Mother’s Day because she felt “...that the day's sentiment was being sacrificed at the expense of greed and profit.”  She filed a lawsuit in 1923 to stop a Mother’s Day celebration, and went so far as to be arrested for trying to stop the sell of carnations to a group of war mothers.  Jarvis had meant for Mother’s Day to be “’a day of sentiment, not profit...’” for the greeting card industry, “...which she saw as ‘a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.’”  To her dying day in 1948, Jarvis regretted ever creating the holiday.  But, really, what did she expect?  After all, this is America, and if there is a way to make a buck off something, you have to be pretty naïve to think somebody won’t. 

Incidentally, Anna Jarvis never had children.

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