Mother: the topic of songs penned by mama’s boys ranging from Tupac to Danzig, the word blazed onto the arms of a million sweet-faced, 18-year-old boys, a word in a mnemonic device designed to help kids learn the planets, the wearer of ‘the pants,’ the holder of that first car’s keys, the maker of the dinners, the shoulder to cry on after that first big breakup. Ah, mother.
Where, oh where, did we come up with the idea of Mother’s Day? Meet Anna Jarvis, the 10th of 13 children inspired by the work of her own mother. Jarvis, an ‘unwed, childless insurance clerk from West Virginia, spent almost a decade petitioning for the establishment of a day when children could thank their tireless, hardworking mothers… Ten years later, unhappy with what she saw as the bastardization and over-commercialization of her original intention, she devoted the rest of her life to the dissolution of the very holiday she had fought so hard to create,’ wrote Katherine Jamieson, who penned a very compelling article in the April/May 2009 edition of Bust.
The first efforts to establish a Mother’s Day began in 1872 with Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the lyrics to ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ The idea flopped and lay dormant until 1905. Jarvis’ mother, Anna Marie Reeves Jarvis, served as the inspiration for Jarvis’ idea of a Mother’s Day. Anna Marie had always envisioned a day that ‘leveraged the theme of maternal care to promote peace.’ When she passed away on the second Sunday of May in 1905, Jarvis vowed to make her mother’s dream a reality. Jarvis began her quest by writing hundreds of letters, campaigning for the establishment of such a day, but it wasn’t until she teamed up with a man that the idea took hold.
Enter John Wanamaker, founder of Wanamaker’s department stores in Pennsylvania. Wanamaker was a bit of an innovator. His store was the first with a telephone, the first to use electric lights, he offered his employees free medical care and profit-sharing plans, and he created the price tag. Although he was a practicing Christian — the reason he touted was his motivation for celebrating Mother’s Day — one cannot help but wonder if dollar signs were in his eyes.
According to Jamieson, the first mother’s day service took place May 10, 1908 in the Wanamaker Store Auditorium in Philadelphia. A crowd of 15,000 listened to Jarvis give her plea for a Mother’s Day holiday. She also sent 500 white carnations (her choice for a symbol) to Mothers in the congregation of her West Virginia church. The following year, 45 states, Mexico, and Canada observed Mother’s Day. By 1914, Congress had issued a resolution establishing the holiday that President Woodrow Wilson signed.
Jarvis’ intentions for Mother’s Day to be an ‘intimate day for every mother’s child to express deep love and fidelity’ soon turned into the media frenzied, gift-giving, brunch-feeding extravaganza we know and tolerate today. By 1923, Jarvis was just as passionatly opposed to Mother’s Day and what it had become as she was passionate for its creation a scant 18 years before. Though childless, until the year of her death in 1948 Jarvis received thousands of Mother’s Day cards, and was crushed seeing her life’s work turned against her.
When prompted, my mother said her favorite Mother’s Day memories came from a time when my brothers and I were young: ‘quietly’ making her a breakfast to be served in bed, shoving our handmade cards in her faces while she pretended to still be sleeping. Maybe it’s a subtle combination of maturity and childlike wonder that allows us to thank our mothers in a way Jarvis would have appreciated. Regardless, for Jarvis’ sake, think twice about who your mother is before sending off a box of chocolates or strolling out for an overpriced brunch. After all, what would Anna Jarvis do?
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