Mother’s Day is a celebration honoring the mother of the family or individual, as well as motherhood, maternal bonds, and the influence of mothers in society.
The modern holiday was first celebrated in 1907 when Anna Jarvis held the first Mother’s Day service of worship at Andrews Methodist Episcopal church in Grafton, West Virginia. Her campaign to make Mother’s Day a recognized holiday in the United States began in 1905, the year her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died. Ann Jarvis had been a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War, and created Mother’s Day Work clubs to address public health issues. She and another peace activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe had been urging for the creation of “Mother’s Day for Peace” where mother would ask that their husbands and sons were no longer killed in wars. It was 40 years before it became an official holiday when Ward Howe had made her Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, which called upon mothers of all nationalities to band together to promote the “amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interest of peace.” Anna Jarvis wanted to honor this and to set aside a day to honor all mothers because she believed a mother is “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”
In 1908, the U.S. Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother’s Day an official holiday, and joked that they would also have to proclaim a “Mother-in-law’s Day.” But owing to the efforts of Anna Jarvis, by 1911 all U.S. states observed the holiday. In 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating Mother’s Day, held on the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday to honor mothers.
Although Jarvis, who started Mother’s Day as a liturgical service, was successful in founding the celebration, she became resentful of the commercialization of the holiday. By the early 1920’s, Hallmark cards and other companies had started selling Mother’s Day cards. Jarvis believed that the companies had misinterpreted and exploited the idea of Mother’s Day and that the emphasis of the holiday was on sentiment, not profit. As a result, she organized boycotts of Mother’s Day, and threatened to issue lawsuits against the companies involved. She argued that people should appreciate and honor their mothers through handwritten letters expressing their love and gratitude, instead of buying gifts and pre-made cards. She protested at a candy makers’ convention in Philadelphia in 1923, and at a meeting of American War Mothers in 1925. By this time, carnations had become associated with Mother’s Day, and the selling of carnations by the American War Mothers to raise money angered Jarvis, who was arrested for disturbing the peace.
In the United States, Mother’s Day remains one of the biggest days for sales of flowers, greeting cards, etc. and is also the biggest holiday for long-distance telephone calls. Mother’s Day is a $25 billion holiday in America, with those who celebrate spending about $200 on mom. Gift givers spend more than $5 billion on jewelry alone, and nearly another $5 billion on that special outing. Then there’s $843 million on cards, and $2.6 billion each on flowers and gift certificates, according to recent data. Churchgoing is also popular on Mother’s Day, yielding the highest church attendance after Christmas Eve and Easter. Many worshipers celebrate the day with carnations, colored if the mother is living and white if she is dead.
“To have Mother’s Day the burdensome, wasteful, expensive gift day that Christmas and other special days have become, is not our pleasure,” she said in 1920. “If the American people are not willing to protect Mother’s Day from the hordes of money schemers that would overwhelm it with their schemes, then we shall cease having a mother’s Day—and we know how.”
Jarvis herself never profited from her idea. In 1948, at the age of 84, she died penniless—having used all her money to fight the holiday’s commercialization—in a sanitarium.