The Mother of Mother’s Day

The tiny city of Grafton, West Virginia—population 5,500—takes pride in its Memorial Day parade, which has been held there every year since 1869, but Mother’s Day is an even bigger deal in Grafton. That holiday was born there, on May 19, 1908. It was invented by a woman obsessed with her own mother.

Before that there was a kind of pre-Mother’s Day. In 1870 Julia Ward Howe, the activist and poet who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” proposed a Mother’s Day in a pamphlet titled An Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World. Her aim was not to honor mothers and motherhood but to protest war. She wanted a Mothers’ Day of Peace, with demonstrations. The country was still reeling from the Civil War, and across the Atlantic the Franco-Prussian War had just begun. “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience,” she wrote. “We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” A well-attended festival in Boston celebrated the first Mothers’ Day of Peace on June 2, 1873, and the day was also observed in 17 other American cities and in Rome and Constantinople. But enthusiasm quickly waned, and it never really caught on. It would take the efforts of another woman, with a decidedly different idea of Mother’s Day, to create the holiday we know.

During the Civil War Ann Reeves Jarvis organized what she called “mother’s friendship clubs” in West Virginia to teach parents about sanitation and hygiene. She wanted to prevent disease, which was a life-or-death concern in Appalachia at the time. Her clubs also provided care to wounded soldiers, both Union and Confederate. At Sunday school she sometimes lectured on “Great Mothers of the World.” The concept of motherhood as something sacred, a balm to heal all wounds, preoccupied her—perhaps not surprisingly, considering the tragedies that befell her. Seven of her eleven children died before reaching adulthood. She felt a holiday should be set aside to honor motherhood, and she instilled this idea in her daughter, Anna M. Jarvis.

The two were extremely close. Indeed, Anna lived with her parents until she was 28, in part because her mother was reluctant to have her leave the nest. When Ann Reeves Jarvis died, in Philadelphia in May 1905, Anna, then 41, was inconsolable. She grieved so deeply for so long, in fact, that relatives and friends became worried. After she suffered nearly a year of constant sorrow, a cousin suggested she find a way to continue her mother’s work, to help her assuage her grief.

And she did so—with a vengeance. She took up the cause of creating a holiday when children would honor their mothers and motherhood itself would be celebrated. She resolved to make Mother’s Day—to be held on the anniversary of her own mother’s death—a new national tradition.

To that end she wrote to nearly every important person she could think of—governors, congressmen, newspaper editors, and even Presidents. She enlisted the help of wealthy businessmen, such as John Wanamaker, the department-store magnate, and Henry J. Heinz, the founder of Heinz Foods. She contacted the Andrews Methodist Church in her birthplace of Grafton, where her mother had taught Sunday school for 20 years, and it became the very first place to officially observe her new holiday, in a ceremony held on May 10, 1908, the third anniversary of Ann Reeves Jarvis’s death. Later that same day, there was another observance at Wanamaker Auditorium in Philadelphia, where Anna gave a lengthy and impassioned speech.

By 1914, thanks to Anna Jarvis’s unceasing—indeed, obsessive—efforts, Mother’s Day was observed in nearly every state in the Union, and Congress passed a resolution, signed by President Woodrow Wilson, creating a national Mother’s Day holiday, to be observed on the second Sunday in May.

That was still not enough. Anna Jarvis lobbied other countries to observe the holiday as well, with remarkable success. Forty-three nations adopted Mother’s Day, and many still celebrate it today. But as the years passed, she became increasingly embittered by the commercialization of her holiday. She complained that florists, confectioners, and greeting-card makers were fleecing the public on the day she had worked so hard to establish. Greeting cards, in particular, raised her ire. Buying a printed one for one’s mother was not the same as writing her a personal note, she said. In 1923 she even filed suit against New York Gov. Al Smith and U.S. Sen. Royal S. Copeland for commercializing her idea by planning a gala Mother’s Day celebration at a New York stadium—and she succeeded in having the event cancelled.

Mother’s Day took over her life, and as the paperwork and correspondence piled up, she bought the house next door to her own simply to hold it all. In the end, her obsession overwhelmed her. She became more and more paranoid as she grew older, and she died penniless in a Pennsylvania sanatorium in 1948, aged 84.

Despite her efforts, the greeting card industry today sells about $150 million worth of Mother’s Day cards every year. But the tradition as Anna Jarvis began it lives on too. In 1964 the Andrews Methodist Church, in Grafton, West Virginia—the place of the first Mother’s Day—became the International Mother’s Day Shrine. Its stated mission: “To preserve, promote, and develop through education the Spirit of Motherhood, as exemplified by the lives of Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis and Anna Jarvis, and the institution of Mother's Day that they established.” Anna Jarvis would no doubt be pleased.

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.