Mother's Day founder Anna Jarvis, left, and her own mother and inspiration, right.
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The following year on May 10 the church, at Jarvis’s urging, expanded the service to include honoring all mothers and Jarvis’s friend, Philadelphia merchant prince John Wanamaker conducted a public observance in the auditorium of this store.
Jarvis tirelessly
dedicated herself to spreading the observance.
She wrote articles and pamphlets, lobbied city councils, state
legislatures, and Congress for proclamations establishing an official
observance. West Virginia was the first to act, in 1910, followed by several
other states over the next years.
Jarvis’s efforts paid
off when Congress on May 8, 1914
established the second Sunday in May
as Mother’s Day and requesting the President issue a proclamation. Woodrow Wilson wasted no time, issuing
his proclamation the next day, May 9, the official
birthday of the Federal observance.
By 1914 when Woodrow Wilson issued the first official national Mother's Day Proclamation, greeting card companies were already busy peddling sentimental cards like this one.
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Wilson’s proclamation
directed Americans to show the flag in honor of mothers who had lost
sons in war. That part of the declaration is an indication
that Wilson was probably aware of
the earlier efforts of Julia Ward Howe to
establish a Mother’s Day observance to protest
war.
Ward’s moving Mother’s Day Proclamation was written
in 1870 in reaction to the carnage of the Civil
War and the Franco-Prussian War
and called for women across the globe to unite to end war. Although that noble effort never produced
either the movement or the observation
that Howe had hoped for, the effort was well known. When Howe died only four years earlier in
1910 full of honors as the writer of
the Battle
Hymn of the Republic and the most famous American woman of letters, her obituaries
revived interest in her effort, particularly among pacifists.
In recent years the
memory Howe’s Proclamation has been revived by the peace and feminist movements
and by her Unitarian Universalist
faith community and has been re-connected
to Jarvis’s celebration.
By the mid-1920’s Jarvis and her sister became embittered at the commercialization of the holiday they
worked so hard to create. The sisters
spent the rest of their lives and all of their inheritance battling that trend.
They trademarked the names Mother’s Day and Second Sunday in May to try to keep merchants from using them. But there we too many fires to put out and
not enough lawyers in the world to
stamp out flagrant infringement. At least once she was arrested for protesting.
Merchants, and especially the greeting card manufacturers that Jarvis
particularly loathed, actually organized and launched a counter attack portraying her as demented and obsessed. They even questioned her patriotism.
Since newspapers profited
handsomely from Mother’s Day advertising,
they were more than happy to abet the
smear campaign.
Card companies, florists, candy companies, restaurants, and merchants still hype Mother's Day, the third most important gift-giving day of the year behind only Christmas and Valentine's Day.
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Jarvis and her sister spent their
last dime in the fight and were reduced to
abject poverty. Anna never married
or had children of her own. Mother’s Day was her child and she fought fiercely to the end to defend its honor.
She died in West Chester, Pennsylvania in
1948 at the age of 84 in obscurity.
Ironically, many of the same
merchants and business interests
that had once vilified her later found it useful to enshrine her in legend, taking great care that her distaste for
what the observance had become was carefully omitted from their new version of the founding myth—along with any mention of Julia Ward Howe’s earlier
effort.
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