The Real History of Mother’s Day Is Surprisingly Dark
Mother’s Day should be rewarding and boring: flowers, a Hallmark card, maybe doing some chores at least once. But the American version of Mother’s Day was not born in a garden. It was forged in the smoke and death of the Civil War, shaped by radical women, and became a battleground between profit and principle—a holiday so controversial that its own creator spent her life trying to destroy it. The history of Mother’s Day is one hell of a dramatic one.
Ancient Ancestors of Mother’s Day
Mothers have been around for a long time and that is why holidays are held in their honor. Similar celebrations have existed at least since the ancient Greeks and Romans held festivals in honor of mother goddesses such as Cybele and Rhea . During the Middle Ages, the church gave a Christian twist to the idea by creating Mothering Sunday , a day in honor of the Mother Church. Versions of Mother’s Day are celebrated on different days and in different ways around the world. In Peru, on Mother’s Day you visit cemeteries. In Albania, they celebrate their mother on March 8th. But these other “Mother’s Days” are not the direct inspiration for Mother’s Day as we celebrate it in the United States.
A holiday born in blood
Mother’s Day officially began in the United States in 1914, but the holiday’s roots go back to the pre-Civil War era with social activist and community organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis. “Mother Jarvis” (as she was known) was the founder and champion of the Mother’s Day Workers’ Clubs, grassroots public health organizations dedicated to reducing infant mortality rates by teaching women how to properly care for their children, improve sanitation, and fight disease. It was “Mother Jarvis’s” personal crusade: she gave birth to between 11 and 13 children, and only four survived to adulthood.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Mother’s Day labor clubs shifted their focus to caring for wounded soldiers on both sides of the conflict. By 1868, when the Civil War ended, Jarvis promoted the peace-oriented Mothers’ Friendship Day movement to bring former Union and Confederate soldiers together for reconciliation.
“Why don’t the mothers of humanity intervene in these matters to prevent the waste of that human life that they alone bear and know the value of?” Jarvis wrote . (Yes, why not ? Come on, Mom.)
Jarvis was not alone. Across the country, other women also organized proto-Mother’s Days. Abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, calling on all mothers to unite and promote world peace. Howe later advocated for a holiday called Mother’s Peace Day to be celebrated every year on June 2. Juliet Calhoun Blakely, a temperance activist from Michigan, inspired local Mother’s Day celebrations there in the 1870s. The cultural winds were blowing toward Mother’s Day, but it took Jarvis’ death to make it official.
Anne Reeves Jarvis died in 1905 (sadly without ending the war), but her daughter Anne Jarvis took up the activist mantle. On the first anniversary of her mother’s death, Anna announced plans to hold a memorial service for her mother the following year. She envisioned a national holiday to honor the sacrifices mothers make for their children. In 1908, Jarvis, with financial support from fat men John Wanamaker and H.J. Heinz hosted a formal Mother’s Day celebration at a West Virginia church and Wanamaker’s department store. Both went well, inspiring Jarvis to create a national holiday. But it also gave Wanamaker and other enterprising individuals a glimpse into the potential profits of Mother’s Day, and thus began the battle for the soul of Mother’s Day.
Mother’s Day has become a commercial
By 1912, Jarvis quit her job and founded the International Mother’s Day Association , which formed partnerships with local businesses and conducted letter-writing campaigns to government officials. Cities and churches in several states adopted Mother’s Day as an annual holiday, and by 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made it an official holiday . There were a few haters, such as Sen. Henry Moore Teller (D-Colorado), who called the resolution “childish” and “absolutely absurd,” but most people liked the idea.
So Jarvis got what she wanted and everything worked out great. Wait. This didn’t happen at all. Jarvis considered Mother’s Day “a day of feeling, not profit,” but capitalists like Wanamaker and Heinz didn’t care about her opinion. They quickly capitalized on the widespread interest in the holiday, and the celebration almost immediately transformed from a meaningful day dedicated to honoring the sacrifices a mother had made and promoting peace, to an opportunity to buy many things for her mother. Jarvis hated it.
Anne Jarvis’ Quixotic Anti-Mother’s Day Campaign
By 1920, Jarvis had denounced her former financial backers, urged everyone not to buy their mothers anything for Mother’s Day, and classified anyone who made money from the holiday as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites, who by their greed would undermine one of the finest, noblest and most sincere movements and holidays.”
Jarvis expressed her disapproval of restaurants offering Mother’s Day specials by throwing a “Mother’s Day salad” on the floor of a Philadelphia diner. She also disapproved of greeting cards, writing: “A sentimental, insincere printed card or ready-made telegram means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone else in the world.” And don’t give your mom candy for Mother’s Day: “Candy!” Jarvis wrote: “You bring the box to your mother and then eat most of it yourself. It’s a great feeling.”
But the worst Mother’s Day offenders, the biggest racketeers and pirates, were the damn florists . Jarvis fucking hated the flower industry. At her own expense, she sent thousands of buttons featuring the white carnation (the official flower of Mother’s Day) to women’s groups across the country in an effort to stop them from buying flowers. She has threatened to file a trademark lawsuit against Florist Telegraph Delivery (FTD) for combining carnations with the words “Mother’s Day”. She protested the US government’s Mother’s Day stamp because it used the painting Whistler’s Mother , and she interpreted the carnations on it as an advertisement for “The Big Flower”. Jarvis was even arrested for disturbing the peace when she tried to physically stop the sale of carnations.
The sad and lonely death of a Mother’s Day mother
Say what you will about her, Anne Jarvis was dedicated to her craft (literally). Calling your party sponsors “kidnappers” and “termites” comes at a cost, and Jarvis paid it in full. By mid-century she was penniless and living in her sister’s house in Philadelphia, with no trace of the influence that had once been exerted over the President of the United States. In 1943, while trying to gather signatures for a petition to abolish Mother’s Day entirely , Jarvis was forced to check into the Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where the flower and greeting card industry footed the bill. Whether this was a corporate PR stunt to provide (no doubt much-needed) mental health care to a difficult but important figure in the industry, or whether it was the latest twist of the knife depends on your point of view. Jarvis died on November 24, 1948, without having any children of her own, but she took her principles to her clove-scented grave.