Moms have been around for a long time, and so have celebrations to honor them. These kinds of celebrations have been around at least since the ancient Greeks and Romans threw festivals in honor of mother goddesses like Cybele and Rhea. During the Medieval period, the church put a Christian spin on the idea with Mothering Sunday, a day honoring the Mother Church. Versions of Mother's Day are celebrated on different days and different ways around the world. In Peru, you visit cemeteries on Mother's Day. In Albania, you celebrate your mom on March 8. But these other "Mother's Days" aren't the direct inspiration for Mother's Day as we celebrate it in the United States.
A holiday born in blood
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Mothers' Day Work Clubs shifted their focus to caring for wounded soldiers on both sides of the conflict. By 1868, with the Civil War over, Jarvis promoted a peace-focused movement for “Mothers’ Friendship Day," dedicated to bringing bringing former Union and Confederate soldiers together to reconcile.
Jarvis wasn't alone. Across the country, other women were also organizing proto-Mother's Days. Abolitionist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation” in 1870, which called on all mothers to unite and promote world peace. Howe later campaigned for a holiday called “Mother’s Peace Day” to be celebrated every June 2. Juliet Calhoun Blakely, a temperance activist from Michigan, inspired a local Mother’s Day to be celebrated there in the 1870s. The cultural winds were blowing toward Mother's Day, but it took Jarvis' death to make it official.
By 1912, Jarvis had quit her job and started the Mother’s Day International Association, which formed partnerships with local businesses and ran letter-writing campaigns to government officials. Towns and churches in several states adopted Mother’s Day as an annual holiday, and by 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made it an official holiday in 1914. There were a few haters, like Senator Henry Moore Teller (D-CO) who called the resolution “puerile" and “absolutely absurd,” but most people loved the idea.
Ann Jarvis' quixotic campaign against Mother's Day
By 1920, Jarvis had denounced her former financial backers, called on everyone to not buy their moms anything on Mother's Day, and categorized anyone who makes money off the holiday as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest, and truest movements and celebrations.”
But the worst Mother's Day offenders of all, the biggest racketeers and pirates, were the damn florists. Jarvis freakin' hated the flower industry. At her own expense, she sent thousands of buttons featuring a picture of a white carnation (the official flower of Mother's Day) to women's groups all over the country in a bid to have them not buy any flowers. She threatened a trademark lawsuit against Florist Telegraph Delivery (FTD) for combining carnations with the words "Mother's Day." She protested the U.S. government's Mother's Day stamp because it used the painting Whistler's Mother, and she interpreted the carnations in it as an advertisement for Big Flower. Jarvis was even arrested for disturbing the peace when she tried to physically stop the sale of carnations.
The sad, lonely death of the mother of Mother's Day
Say what you will about her, Ann Jarvis was committed (literally). Calling the backers of your holiday "kidnappers" and "termites" comes with a price, and Jarvis paid it in full. By mid-century, she was penniless, living in her sister's house in Philadelphia without any trace of the influence that once swayed the President of the United States. In 1943, while trying to collect signatures on a petition to abolish Mother’s Day completely, Jarvis was forced into the Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where representatives of the Flower and Greeting Card industry paid the bill. Whether this was a corporate public relations move to provide (no doubt much needed) psychiatric care to a difficult but important figure in the industry, or a final twist of the knife depends on your point of view. Jarvis died on November 24, 1948, never having children of her own, but she took her principles to her carnation-scented grave.
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