The story behind the popular holiday.

By Charly SHELTON

We all know Mother’s Day – the second Sunday in May that always follows that iPhone alert you set to remind yourself to order flowers a week in advance so they’ll be delivered in time. It’s a day to make mom breakfast in bed, do the cooking, cleaning and other chores she normally does, and tell her how much you love her. Mother’s Day sees the highest number of phone calls of any day of the year, either for those who live far away from their mothers or those who hit ignore on that iPhone reminder and now need to find last minute flower delivery. But the holiday’s origins are not as sweet and rosy as the holiday has become. The story involves fallen Civil War soldiers, protests at candy-making conventions, President Wilson and a once proud volunteer winding up in the looney bin.

The story begins in the 1850s. Ann Reeves Jarvis was a West Virginian women’s organizer and volunteer. Her project at the time was the Mother’s Day Work Clubs – a group of seasoned mothers getting together to teach young mothers the tools of the trade, how to change diapers and warm milk, how to burp babies and fold that terrifying cloth origami that was a pinafore. This evolved into a group of compassionate volunteers who gave a mother’s love to the projects they took on. The group was heavily active during the Civil War, visiting hospitals on both Union and Confederate sides and consoling the injured men. Then after the war the group expanded, inviting bereaved mothers on both sides to join them in doing good as a remembrance for their fallen soldiers. Their main focus became reconciliation between the surviving soldiers and citizens of the North and South.

Jarvis and her fellow volunteers organized Mother’s Friendship Day picnics to get the public out and interacting, having a good time and promoting peace. At the same time, Julia Ward Howe, another active mother and the composer of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” composed a widely read “Mother’s Day Proclamation” that called for mothers to take an active role in politically promoting peace.

Ann Reeves Jarvis died in 1905 and in 1908 her daughter, Anna Jarvis, began Mother’s Day as a day of celebrating your particular mother and the accomplishments she has made. It was a day for honoring your favorite mother and spending the day with her to tell her how much she means to you, and maybe take her to church. It’s a personal thing between mother and child. This folds in aspects of Mothering Sunday, an early Christian holiday celebrated in England, where good Christians would go to mass at the Mother church, the main cathedral for the wider region as opposed to their local parish. Families would gather from towns all over and go to church together, usually celebrating family reunions at the time, of which mothers were a big part.

Anna Jarvis lobbied to have the holiday added to the official calendar and, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson set aside the second Sunday in May to commemorate all that mothers do for their children. And like any other holiday in America, it quickly became a commercial gold mine.

Flower sales, candy sales, greeting card sales, and jewelry sales all skyrocketed. It became a day to buy generic gifts to celebrate all moms together. This incensed Jarvis into a fury and she began to fight back against the holiday she had created. She argued that it was too commercialized and impersonal. It was not about the gifts and celebrating all mothers, it was about one child showing appreciation for their own mother. Not Mothers’ Day, but Mother’s Day. She spent the rest of her life fighting the holiday, trying to get it removed from the calendar and protesting it. She showed up at random confectioners conventions and florist meetings to cause a ruckus and was often arrested for disturbing the peace. She sued charities and merchants alike for profiting from the use of the term “Mother’s Day” and spent most of her considerable fortune on legal fees, even going so far as to publicly call out Eleanor Roosevelt for using Mother’s Day as a springboard to raise funds for her charity. She fought the holiday until at least the early 1940s and, in 1948, penniless and suffering from dementia, she died in Marshall Square Sanitarium in Philadelphia.

Regardless how each person recognizes Mother’s Day – with or without candy or flowers – the spirit of the occasion honors the important role that a mother plays in her children’s lives.

  Charly Shelton