Mother’s Day Founder Anna Marie Jarvis Battled its Commercialization

  

 

Mother's Day founder Anna Jarvis, right, and her own mother and inspiration, left.

Note--Our annual Mother's Day post is back yet again.

The celebration of Mother’s Day as we know it now is generally credited to Anna Marie Jarvis in memory of her mother, who died on May 9, 1905.  The first commemorative service was held at the Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia where Jarvis’s mother had been a Sunday school teacher on May 12, 1907. 

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 his 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 on May 8, 1914 when Congress 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.

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.  

 

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 were 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.

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.

Merchants, and especially the greeting card manufacturers that Jarvis particularly loathed, actually organized and launched a counterattack 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.

 Anna Jarvis's gravestone.

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 obscurity in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1948 at the age of 84.

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.

Father’s Day—A Second Rate Celebration

 

Although today most Dad's eschew neck ties, they remain an iconic symbol of the day. 

Note—This is a nearly annual post.  This year the proprietor of this blog, an old breeder, will celebrate Father’s Day staffing the Tree of Life booth at Woodstock’s Pride Fest.  Stop by and say hello.  Fatherly hugs available on request.

I may have mentioned before that Father’s Day is the redheaded stepchild of holidays.  It gets less respect than Rodney Dangerfield and is widely perceived for what it is—a tiny participation trophy to the gold plated loving cup that is Mothers’ Day.  And that’s alright with most Dads who would rather just sleep in, thank you, and pass on the fuss.

Once neckties were the gift of choice, but since few Dads regularly use them anymore, sales have concentrated on novelty coffee mugs, t-shirts, and caps, all cheaper than a dozen roses or two pounds of gourmet chocolates for Mom.  If the family insists on dragging the Old Man out to dinner, a chain bar and grill with plenty of meat, cheap margaritas, and waitresses in tight t-shirts will do just fine.

It’s a good Hallmark holiday.  But if you peruse the selection in the supermarket you would swear that all Dads want to do is go golfing or fishing, tool around in a vintage car, or drink beer.  There are also plenty of pipes despite the fact that fewer men use them than ever.  Never mind, Pop won’t care as long as it’s signed, no mushy sentiment required.

Just how Father’s Day is clearly the afterthought to Mothers’ Day is revealed by the history of the celebration.  By the way, note the apostrophe is placed as a singular instead of the plural in Mothers’ Day.  That wasn’t entirely accidental either though it shows a certain grammar sloppiness that Mom would never tolerate.

 

Sonora Smart Dodd, founder of Father's Day and her father and inspiration William Jackson Smart.
 

Father’s Day was first observed in Spokane, Washington at the YMCA on June 19, 1910.  It was the brainchild of Sonora Smart Dodd, who was born in Arkansas in 1882 the daughter of Confederate Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart.  He was a widower and a single parent who raised his six children there.

Sonora was married to a funeral home owner and was a young mother living in Spokane in 1909 when she heard Mothers’ Day founder Anna Jarvis speak at the city’s Central Methodist  Episcopal Church.  She told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday honoring them. She initially suggested June 5, her father’s birthday for the occasion the following year, the minister felt that more time between the two parental celebrations was better and selected third Sunday of June instead.

 

                                               Although she could not have cared less Mothers' Day Founder Anna Jarvis indirectly inspired Father's Day.

Dodd’s celebration drew national attention, although many newspapers mocked it as a Johnny-come-lately imitation of Mothers’ Day.  A bill for national recognition of the celebration was introduced in Congress in 1913 but died on the vine. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson went to Spokane to speak in a Father’s Day celebration and wanted to make it official, but Congress resisted, fearing that it would become commercialized.  Calvin Coolidge recommended in 1924 that the day be observed by the nation but stopped short of issuing a national proclamation.

Dodd did not give the unwavering attention to promoting her brainchild like Jarvis.  In the post-World War I years with her marriage deteriorating Dodd left Spokane to study at the Art Institute of Chicago and dabbling in painting and writing poetry.  She even worked for a while as a costume designer in Hollywood.  Over the rest of the 1920s attention to the celebration waned nationally and even in its hometown Spokane.

 

Tobacco products and especially pipes were so heavily promoted as gifts that they became emblematic of the commercial holiday.  1950s ads showing children and wives showering Dad with cans of tobacco and cartons of cigarettes now look like assassination attempts.  

In the 1930s Dodd returned to Spokane and started promoting the celebration again, raising awareness at a national level.  Unlike Jarvis who waged an unrelenting war on the commercialization of Mothers’ Day, Dodd turned to trade groups that would benefit most from the holiday—the manufacturers of and retailers of ties and men’s wear, tobacco pipes, and any traditional present to fathers.  Beginning in 1938 she had the full support and aid of the Father’s Day Council, founded by the New York Associated Men’s Wear Retailers to consolidate and systematize the commercial promotion.

 

 This greeting card ad captures the nuclear family vibe of the 1950's with Dad at the center.  Yet a whole generation of Boomer children went to therapy to recover from feeling denied approval from "cold and emotionally unavailable fathers."

There was backlash against the hype and crass hucksterism and frank ambivalence over whether fathers deserved the attention.

The tide turned after World War II when millions of ex-GIs came home to establish families.  The 1950’s booming economy, the enshrinement of the nuclear rather than the extended family as the norm and ideal, and the promotion of rigid gender roles made the decade the Golden Age of Father’s Day.

Still, there was no national recognition of the holiday.  In 1957 Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote a proposal accusing Congress of ignoring fathers for 40 years while honoring mothers, “singling out just one of our two parents.”  Nothing came of it. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day.  Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.

 

It turns out that Dodd’s was not the first Father’s Day celebration—or the first one inspired by Jarvis.  In 1908 Mrs. Grace Golden Clayton asked the minister of the Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South in Fairmont, West Virginia, not far from Grafton where Jarvis held her first Mothers’ Day service at another Methodist Church.  Unlike Jarvis, Clayton was not just moved by the loss of her own parent, but by a disaster of enormous proportions.

 

 Families wait for word of the fate of their loved ones during futile rescue efforts at the Monangah Mining Disaster.

On December 6, 1907, 367 men were working in Fairmont Coal Company mines when, unexpectedly, an explosion occurred which killed an estimated 362 of the miners, with only four escaping and one being rescued by those who came to help. The four who escaped later died of their injuries. The Monongah Mining Disaster is widely considered the worst mining disaster in American History.   Over 1000 children lost their fathers.

Despite, or maybe because of the tragic background, Clayton’s celebration never caught on.  Unlike Spokane, Fairmont never issued an official proclamation to honor the celebration.  Neither Clayton nor the community did much to promote it after the initial observation in part because the Fairmont Coal Company did not want to keep the story of the disaster alive.  It is only in later years that Clayton’s moving commemoration was even given a footnote in the history of Father’s Day.

As is often the case, there are other claimants to Father’s Day.

In 1911, Jane Addams proposed a citywide Father’s Day celebration in Chicago but was turned down.

In 1912, a Father’s Day celebration was held in Vancouver, Washington, suggested by Methodist pastor J.J. Berringer of the Irvington Methodist Church after a 1911 suggestion in the Portland Oregonian.  They were evidently unaware of the Spokane celebration on the other end of the state.

Harry C. Meek, a member of Lions Clubs International, claimed that he had first come up with the idea for Father’s Day in 1915. The Lions Club has named him the Originator of Father’s Day and continues to promote his claim.  Meek made many efforts to promote Father’s Day and make it an official holiday even after becoming aware of Dodd’s celebration.

So much for History.

Now you can keep or neglect Father’s Day as you will.

 

Mother’s Day Founder Anna Marie Jarvis Faught Against its Commercialization

 

 

Mother's Day founder Anna Jarvis, right, and her own mother and inspiration, left.

The celebration of Mother’s Day as we know it now is generally credited to Anna Marie Jarvis in memory of her mother, who died on May 9, 1905.  The first commemorative service was held at the Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia where Jarvis’s mother had been a Sunday school teacher  on May 12, 1907. 

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.

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.  

 

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 were 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.

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.

Merchants, and especially the greeting card manufacturers that Jarvis particularly loathed, actually organized and launched a counterattack 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.

 Anna Jarvis's grave stone.

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 obscurity in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1948 at the age of 84.

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.