Mother's Day and Anna Jarvis

Anna Jarvis is often called the mother of Mother's Day. An appropriate title for a woman that made such a pains-taking effort to deliver to the door of the American people, a healthy, fast growing national holiday.

Poor Anna Jarvis tried to throttle that burgeoning Amazon 'Mother's Day', before it was even 10 years old, and she spent her last thirty years and the family inheritance fighting her creation with the same activist zeal she had used to establish the celebration in the first place.

Activist Mothers Day

During the 1800's the concept of motherhood had an activist, expansive and powerful aura under such guiding hands as Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis, in the mid-century, and Julia Ward Howe some years later.

Ann Marie, the mother of Anna Jarvis, organized women and trained them in nursing skills and modern concepts of sanitation both before and during the Civil War. Using organizations called the Mothers' Day Work Clubs these women treated wounded soldiers from both sides of the conflict and saved thousands of lives.

The Mothers' Day Work Clubs encouraged and aided improvements in public health and sanitation, helped raise money for medications and hired women to work in households where the mother was disabled. It was during the late 1860's that they created Mothers' Friendship Days, organized by the pro-active Ann Marie, to heal the emotional wounds inflicted as soldiers of the north and south came home from the Civil War. The Mothers' Friendship Clubs soothed and healed the emotional trauma as they helped feed, clothe and heal the physical injuries of the soldiers on both sides of the war.

Julia Ward Howe produced her Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870 and it still stands as an example of activist motherhood in its call to unite against war.. Here is a stanza from near the beginning :

"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of
charity, mercy and patience."

The Daughter

Anna Jarvis chose St. Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in West Virginia, the church where her mother had taught Sunday School for twenty five years, as a fitting site for a 1907 commemoration of Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis. This was to honor the accomplishments and the memory of a woman that did so much to heal her community as well as the individuals that comprised it. She chose Sunday because she visualized her Mother's Day as a holy day.

The simple ceremony involving Ann Marie's favorite white carnations grew in a few short years to the status of national holiday, eventually to become the second most celebrated holiday in the US.

With the writing crusade pursued by Anna Jarvis on behalf of Mother's Day and the conjunction of commercial, political and social interests the celebration of Mother's Day grew beyond the precepts Anna Jarvis wanted it limited to. It took less than ten years for Anna to become so disgusted with the tone the celebrations were taking that in 1923 she threatened to sue the Governor of New York to stop the planned Mother's Day festivities.

From that point on Anna was on a crusade against everyone that misused the holiday she had so lovingly conceived. By continual letter writing she would remind people that she owned the copyright to Mother's Day and would threaten to sue if the inappropriate activities didn't cease.

The festivities that particularly offended her were the giving of gift cards, boxes of candy and particularly flowers. She spoke of the profiteers this way, "What will you do to route the charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations?"

The vehemence with which she protested those that used Mother's Day for what she saw as improper motives got her arrested for disturbing the peace in the 1930's at a rally where the American War Mothers Association was selling flowers. In 1935 she even accused the first lady Eleanor Roosevelt of "crafty plotting" for using Mother's Day in fundraising campaigns for combating high maternal and infant mortality rates.

This was what Anna Jarvis called 'the expectant mother racket' and did not want celebrations of her Mother's Day associated with them. What an unfortunate difference from the all-encompassing charitable nature of the woman that Anna wanted to do homage to.

When the postage stamp to honor Mother's Day was proposed it included a picture of Ann Marie, a vase of flowers and the words Mother's Day. Anna Jarvis protested the design and by petitioning the court was able to have the phrase Mother's Day removed from the stamp.

Arrested for disturbing the peace at another celebration she said finally that she, "wished she had never started the day because it became so out of control".

The Monster

The commercial possibilities of the holiday she had created did not escape Anna Jarvis. She incorporated as the Mother's Day International Association, got trademarks on the phrase "Mother's Day" and "Second Sunday in May" and on the white carnation. Being the school teacher she was, Anna was very specific about what the apostrophe in her trademark phrase meant and what it helped define.

"...it was to be singular possessive, for each family to honor their mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world."

The concept was clearly conceived by Anna Jarvis and much of the frustration and grief she experienced in her last three decades came from trying to regain control of the 'brand' which had been taken from her almost at the very start.

With relentless marketing by commercial interests and strong backing from social and political organizations Mother's Day celebrations blossomed at an astounding rate. The trade journal, Florists Review, touted it with commercial zeal, "This was a holiday that could be exploited". Candy manufacturers, greeting card producers and restaurants did as well as florists on this wholly commercial if not so holy holiday.

As a gift giving day, Mother's Day is second only to Christmas and is the single most popular day of the year to eat out. $2.6 billion dollars spent on flowers, $1.5 billion on pampering items, $68 million on greeting cards all contribute to the National Retail Foundation prediction that Mother's Day will become a $14 Billion industry.

The efforts of Anna Jarvis to curb the rampant commercialization of her holiday were so obviously in vain it led the Florists Review to crow, "Miss Jarvis was completely squelched".

Anna Jarvis, the mother of Mother's Day, died in 1948 in a Pennsylvania mental institution, blind, penniless, childless and bitter.

Mother's Day

Commercial interests have a vision of what Mother's Day is and promote it with the enthusiasm of the business person. The paradigm for the celebration is laid out in advertising and promoted to familiarity.

Anna Jarvis was haunted to her dying day by the monster she had created and felt her vision of the holiday was the right one, and she promoted it with the determination of a believer in lost causes. She felt that writing a love letter to your mother was a proper way to greet the occasion and of gift cards said,

"A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother-and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment!"

Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis, nursing instructor, sanitation expert and the motherly inspiration for the Mother's Day celebration had another vision entirely. Ann Marie wanted mothers honored for what they did to improve their community, taking it beyond the personal.

Just as with the Mother's Day Work Clubs she organized, she took motherhood into the realm of political philosophy by making 'nurturing everyone' a policy. It has been estimated that to achieve a basic and healthy diet for the entire world would cost $13 billion, in light of that what would Ann Marie think of the $14 billion industry surrounding her Mother's Day?

Reference:
www.wikipedia.org
www.about.com
www.mothersdaycentral.com
www.theholidayspot.com
www.holidays.net
www.wvculture.org
Www.2Canada.com