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Spotlight on Simmons

Mother's Day -- Of Impassioned Origins

Laura Prieto is associate professor of history and women's studies. She is the author of At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Harvard University Press) and other explorations of American culture and women's history.

By Laura Prieto

Mother's Day seems as if it should be an event dating back to the Victorian era, the age that so deeply sentimentalized relationships between mothers and children. But, in fact, it did not become a national holiday until World War I, when that sentimentalism was waning.

The United States tradition of Mother's Day is the result of a one-woman campaign by a bereaved daughter to honor her beloved parent. Anna Reeves Jarvis devoted her life to her family, her church, and her community of Grafton, West Virginia. Seven of her 11 children died before reaching adulthood, and - as her daughter and namesake Anna later remembered - she "never ceased to grieve" over them.

Anna the younger felt awed by her mother's good-heartedness, nobility, piety, and social action in the face of her grief. Her mother taught Sunday school, served as the church organist, and earnestly believed in the power of motherhood to better the world. The elder Anna lectured about "Great Mothers" in history and initiated a "Mother's Friendship Day" in West Virginia to use the bonds between women to heal the scars left by the Civil War. By all accounts, this mother and her daughter shared an intense friendship and love.

After Anna Reeves Jarvis died in May 1905, a personal memorial service did not seem sufficient to her daughter. The younger Anna idealized her mother and became fixated on the idea of commemorating all mothers on the anniversary of her own mother's death. That this anniversary fell in the same month as Memorial Day made it seem all the more appropriate. Jarvis began relentlessly lobbying the news media, government officials, and church leaders to sponsor such a holiday. She eventually quit her job in order to dedicate all her time to the cause.

The idea appealed to a wide range of Americans, both commercially and emotionally. In addition to gaining the support of the floral industry, Jarvis won over other business leaders, such as food manufacturer Henry J. Heinz, and department store magnate John Wanamaker. For others, perhaps including Jarvis, Mother's Day expressed a deep nostalgia for an earlier age that was being overtaken by the faster pace of life, dramatic urban growth, and industrialization.

Though Jarvis was herself a suffragist who had left her small town to become a writer for Fidelity Insurance in Philadelphia, her Mother's Day campaign also appealed to those who wanted to push back against women's increasing political rights and presence in the workforce. They saw the holiday as a reassertion of woman's "proper" place in the home, as a nurturer and caregiver.

In 1910, West Virginia governor William Glasscock issued the first Mother's Day proclamation, asking that all West Virginians "attend church on that day and wear white carnations," Anna the elder's favorite flower. The onset of World War I and a patriotic sense of sacrifice further encouraged the adoption of Mother's Day.

Plenty of national holidays honored men, Jarvis observed, but none recognized women — even though "no loyalty or sacrifice surpass[es] those of mothers and wives who have given for their country's defense lives more precious to them than their own..." Jarvis' dogged letter writing and networking thus culminated in Woodrow Wilson's presidential proclamation of Mother's Day in 1914.

Ironically, the inevitable commercialization of Mother's Day distressed Jarvis greatly in subsequent years. Having achieved her goal of popularizing her holiday, she then turned to protesting the ways in which Americans celebrated it. She even was arrested once for disturbing the peace, when she tried to stop the American War Mothers' sales of carnations on the second Sunday in May. She vigorously defended what she regarded as her copyright over the term "Mother's Day" and decried spinoffs such as Father's Day.

Jarvis died in 1948, impoverished and alone, in a sanatorium. Most sadly, while Mother's Day has become the nation's fourth-largest card-buying occasion, the woman it intended to honor is almost unknown today. The memory of Anna Reeves Jarvis lives on only in her favorite blooms, the white carnations that have remained emblems of the holiday.

For more about the history of Mother's Day and other holidays, Prieto suggests reading Leigh Eric Schmidt's Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton University Press, 1997).