We can thank these three women for Mother’s Day as we know it
By Thomas V. DiBacco
The Mother’s Day the nation celebrates Sunday is the result of the efforts of many women over the last century, especially these three.
The first was Ann
Reeves Jarvis (1832-1905) of Virginia, who started local Mothers’ Day Work Clubs before the Civil War devoted to improving the health and sanitary conditions of mothers and their children. She experienced firsthand the horror of the high infant mortality rate of the time, losing in infancy nine of the 13 children she bore. After the Civil War, she also arranged a Mothers’ Friendship Day in West Virginia, bringing veterans from the North and South together, many for the first time in years.
The second Mother’s
Day influencer was Ann’s daughter Anna Jarvis (1864-1948), a teacher who never married, nor had children. In honor of her mom and other mothers, however, she spent a lifetime campaigning for a national Mother’s Day, to be held on the second Sunday in May, the same day her mother died in 1905. By 1910, West Virginia’s governor declared the second May Sunday Mother’s Day, and Jarvis began the effort to nationalize the day in earnest, but she wanted it observed in a reverential, serious way — privately, among family. In 1914, Jarvis achieved national status for the day, when President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation making Mother’s Day a national holiday.
Although low key at first, the second Sunday in May soon blossomed into a commercial feast, with flowers, candy, printed cards and gifts of all types bought and sold — none of which fit into Jarvis’s goal of a day spent attending church and family get-togethers or, if separated by distance or death, the writing of letters to reflect in personal terms the offspring’s gratitude or solemn visits to cemeteries. Jarvis took issue with such commercialism but failed — sometimes in ugly, public confrontations involving violence and even jail time for disturbing the peace — to change the direction, as the holiday became one of the most lucrative for businesses each year.
Finally, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) took on the holiday, using the press to bring it back toward the objectives of Ann’s work clubs, that is, a Mother’s Day devoted to eradicating infant mortality and unhealthy living conditions for children. A mother of six, one of whom died in infancy, Roosevelt wrote a syndicated newspaper column entitled “My Day” from Dec. 30, 1935, to Sept. 26, 1962, six days a week.
What made the column so attractive was it was extraordinarily ordinary; it wasn’t a hallelujah chorus for Capital City gossip or for reveling in the niceties of White House living. She simply wrote what she did every day mostly as a mother, taking children to the Smithsonian Institution or playing with her grandchildren, or revealing her thoughts about holidays, such as Mother’s Day (no matter that Anna Jarvis criticized her for deviating from her views).
“Sunday will be the 30th anniversary of Mother’s Day,” Roosevelt wrote on May 13, 1944. “This year it is a particularly significant one. War has placed new responsibilities upon mothers, greater sacrifices are demanded of them, and whether they are young or old, their lives are much more difficult. I wish that we could celebrate a
Parent’s Day, for it seems to me that in this country what we really care about is the home, which is created by parents.”
No first lady could be more critical than Roosevelt of children who were ill-treated. Her view of a visit on May 8, 1936, to the District of Columbia Training School for Girls saw her speak her mind. “Never have I seen,” she began,
“‘a school’ which had little claim to that name.” Pointing to the unsanitary conditions and rat infestations, she vowed that “it will, however, take more than [congressional] appropriations to set this institution straight.”
In spite of her efforts, Ann Reeves Jarvis never became famous, and her daughter became infamous, ending up at age
80 in a mental institution where she passed away four years later. Roosevelt, unlike Anna Jarvis, who erroneously believed that gift-giving was incompatible with real love, was the most effective in spreading the message of preventing infant mortality and child abuse.
Of the thousands of words Roosevelt wrote, none could summarize better the meaning of Mother’s Day than “mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world.”