Anna Jarvis.
Does that name mean anything to you? There’s a good chance it doesn’t. But the name, along with the woman it was beholden to, are at the heart of why May 11 is a day 133 million cards are purchased, $2.3 billion worth of flowers are given and 122 million phone calls placed to those who gave us life.
But Anna Jarvis – “mother” and organizer of the first official Mother’s Day celebration in 1908 – never intended it to be the commercial and corporate event the day has become. And after its inauguration, she spent the next four decades actively fighting against it.
In Jarvis’ view, the original vision for Mother’s Day was meant to honour the “services and sacrifices of mothers within the home,” according to Katherine Lane Antolini in her book Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day.
She meant the day to honour the memory of her late mother Ann Reeves Jarvis, a social activist who provided aid to both Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. The elder Jarvis had the idea for “Mother’s Friendship Day” as a way to heal the rift in a community deeply divided by the conflict. Although Jarvis met with limited success, she died and the idea fizzled.
Three days after her death, Ann Jarvis’ daughter, Anna, held a commemorative service for her mother and for all mothers at her church. It became the junior Jarvis’ mission to see her mother’s day become a national day. Which it did; Woodrow Wilson proclaimed it a national holiday in 1914. But the day’s original message was soon to be hijacked, in Jarvis’ mind, by corporate interest, according to Antolini.
The white carnation emblem, which Jarvis proscribed as the symbol of “…truth, purity and broad charity of mother love…” was soon the symbol of the floral industry’s profit motive, with companies cashing in by price gouging the cost of the flower, Antolini writes.
And cards were another source of indignation for Jarvis.
“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,” Jarvis wrote, as quoted in Antolini’s book.
Antolini contends that her vehement rebuke of commercial interest and the wane of the day’s original message eventually cost her, and Jarvis died poor in a sanitarium in 1948.
Ironically, for someone so passionate about safeguarding the veneration of mothers and motherhood, Jarvis was never a mother herself.
So, what’s to take away from this account? Instead of simply buying your mom something, maybe spend some good old fashioned quality time with her, which is something she would surely appreciate.
