Anna Jarvis created Mother’s Day and then tried to abolish it

The second Sunday in May is set aside in the United States to celebrate mothers. There is also a Mother’s Day celebration in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Australia, Mexico, Canada, China, Japan, and Belgium. England’s “Mothering Sunday,” similar to Mother’s Day, is also called Mid-Lent Sunday and it is observed on the fourth Sunday in Lent, though it has largely been replaced by Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May.

Anna Jarvis, born in Grafton, West Virginia in 1864, started the movement to have a Mother’s Day. She wrote letters to politicians, newspaper editors, and church leaders and organized a committee called Mother’s Day International Association to promote the new holiday. From childhood, Anna Jarvis often heard her mother say that she hoped that someone would one day establish a memorial for all mothers, living and dead. She wanted Mother’s Day to be close to Memorial Day so people would recognize mothers for the sacrifices they made for their families in the same way that servicepeople had for their country.

The first official Mother’s Day observance was in May 1907. President Woodrow Wilson gave the day national recognition in 1914. Miss Jarvis spent many years and much of her fortune promoting the Mothers Day movement, however in her later years, she was confronted with a problem that required as much or more time and effort as the establishment of Mothers Day. This was her attempt to thwart commercialization of the day, or otherwise exploiting it for extraneous purposes.

Jarvis spent the last years of her life trying to abolish the holiday she had brought into being, because she protested its commercialization. She did not succeed in preventing such an outcome. She incorporated herself as the Mother’s Day International Association, claimed copyright on the second Sunday of May, and was once arrested for disturbing the peace. She and her sister Ellsinore spent their family inheritance campaigning against the holiday. Both died in poverty. Jarvis, says her New York Times obituary, became embittered because too many people sent their mothers a printed greeting card. She considered it “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.”

References:
Anna Jarvis
Mother’s Day

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