The arresting story of the mother of Mother’s Day

You may know a thing or two about the origins of Mother’s Day, but I’m going to throw in a 99-year-old plot twist involving how a Milford woman had the founder of Mother’s Day arrested.

Psst, in case you’ve done it again and need a last-minute Mother’s Day gift, let me suggest one that’s free.

As a bonus, it would be in the spirit of the holiday’s original intent.

All that’s required is a brief history lesson. You may know a thing or two about the origins of Mother’s Day, but I’m going to throw in a 99-year-old plot twist involving how a Milford woman had the founder of Mother’s Day arrested.

Anna Jarvis fought valiantly to be recognized as, essentially, “the mother of Mother’s Day.” Others suggested similar observances before her, but Jarvis followed a 1907 service in West Virginia marking the second anniversary of her mother’s death by advocating for tributes to all moms. In 1910, Mother’s Day was declared an official holiday in West Virginia. Jarvis put pen to paper (this is a spoiler alert about that free gift) and lobbied to make it a national movement.

In 1909, an item in the Stamford Advocate pooh-poohed the notion: “Mother’s Day has long been established. Its other title is housecleaning time. If you don’t think there is a mother’s day, ask father.”

Five years later, on May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother’s Day a national holiday.

Jarvis even provided directions for how to celebrate Mom.

“Write a letter of praise or gratitude,” she suggested. “Send a gift with it, or at least the ‘memory flower’ (the white carnation). No one is too poor or too busy to send a letter home.”

In 1916, the New Haven Journal-Courier reported that the holiday was being observed at the state penitentiary in Wethersfield. “A better place to test the influence of the anniversary could not have been chosen.” The article neglects to note if inmates were mandated to wear carnations.

Jarvis probably would have approved, as long as the inmates wrote to their moms. But she quickly became jaded about opportunists. Every business seemed to get into the Mother’s Day racket.

Opportunity even knocked (err, rang) for the Southern New England Telephone Co. “Give her the happy surprise of a telephone message of love. The rates are reasonable.”

In Jarvis’ day, that was as lazy as a Happy Mother’s Day emoji.

But the gift suggestions kept pouring in. In 1923 that meant a one-pound box of chocolates or a good book. By 1927, Connecticut print ads were getting a little kinky, marketing “underthings that mother will love.”

Father also might have liked the “one-piece step-in, in flesh color” and Italian silk bloomers.

While Jarvis tried to trademark the carnation (hmm, wouldn’t Mother Nature claim the rights to those?), clothing stores shamelessly tried to sell Dad on the idea of buying suits to tuck that lapel flower into. One Stamford clothier declared it a day when “Men — rich, poor and in between — honor the pal of their cradle days.”

Jarvis would have preferred that merchants keep mum about mom. When she learned the lunch she ordered in a Philadelphia tearoom was named the “Mother’s Day Salad,” she dumped it on the floor. She boycotted florists for price-gouging and protested a confectioner convention in 1923.

Around that time, The Hartford Courant editorialized about a pitch for Mother-In-Law Day by presciently predicting it would likely be followed by “Grandmother’s Day, Grandfather’s Day, Uncles’ Day, Aunt’s Day, Sister’s Day, Step-Father’s Day, StepMother’s Day and several others that could be thought of …” In 1923, that passed for snark. Now, about that arrest. By 1925, Jarvis wasn’t having it from anyone. It wasn’t just those loathsome greeting card companies that didn’t even require that a child scribble a message to mom. She crashed a convention of American War Mothers, accusing them of trying to appropriate the carnation as their own emblem.

Yes, the founder of Mother’s Day decided to go to battle against moms of World War I soldiers. In the City of Brotherly Love, no less. Her own mother had treated wounded soldiers on both sides of the Civil War conflict.

Jarvis was repeatedly denied admission to the Philly convention, so she confronted delegates as they returned from dinner. According to the Stamford Advocate, she used “abusive language.”

Her target was apparently Catherine Tullidge of Milford. Tullidge and H.H. McCleur, spouse of the American War Mothers president, pressed charges of disorderly conduct. Jarvis was taken to the station house and ordered to appear before a magistrate, who dismissed the charges.

A decade later, Jarvis was still at it, accusing first lady Eleanor Roosevelt of exploiting the holiday to raise money and awareness to combat high maternal and infant mortality rates. Remarkably, it was that issue that Jarvis’ own mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, cited as inspiration for her organization of “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” in the 1850s. Only four of her own children (she had 11 or 13, depending on the source) survived to adulthood.

So Anna Jarvis may have had mommy issues. Things didn’t get any better for her. She spent her remaining years trying to rescind the holiday she had popularized. She was mostly acknowledged in newspapers of the era as a crossword puzzle clue. She wrote so many letters that she bought a neighboring house to store her correspondence, according to the Associated Press.

She lived out her days in a sanitarium in West Chester, Pa., before dying penniless and blind at 84 in 1948. She had no children to write to her on the second Sunday in May. According to legend, some of her last bills were paid off by florists. She was buried next to her mother.

For Jarvis, no gift was more personal than something written from the heart. To her, profiteers were “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and termites.” In other words, she would have been in full agreement with those who damn Mother’s Day as a “Hallmark holiday.”

“A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” she once observed.

Now you’ll have to excuse me. I need to find a pen and get to work on that gift for Mom.