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Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail wrote:May 11, 2008
The 'mother' in Mother's Day
Anne Marie Jarvis was 'a lady who could convince the devil to give up his pitchfork'

GRAFTON - In the dim recesses of their minds, most West Virginians know that the first Mother's Day celebration was held in Grafton. They might even recall the name of Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother's Day. If they're really sharp, they know that a bronze sculpture in her likeness is the only statue of a woman in the state Capitol (it's to the right of the information desk in the rotunda).

They probably don't know that Anne Marie Reeves Jarvis, Anna's mother, was a strong, intelligent crusader who sought to improve her community's sanitary conditions after those conditions robbed her of nine of her 13 children.

In the 1850s, when women were most definitely seen, not heard, she persuaded women throughout her community to form "Mother's Day Work Clubs," in which she taught them how to keep their families healthy - and alive.

"Anne Marie had a baby and lost a son on the same day. I can't even imagine how distraught I would be in that situation," said Olive Crow-Dadisman, who restored the Jarvis homestead, just south of Grafton, and leads fact-packed tours.

Soft-spoken and ladylike, Anne Marie energetically organized help for tubercular mothers and inspections to ensure hygienic milk supplies.

"She must have been some kind of lady," Crow-Dadisman said. "She is always described as genteel and soft-spoken, but a lady who could convince the devil to give up his pitchfork."

During the Civil War, soldiers encamped near her home were sickening and dying. Local authorities asked Anne Marie to minister to and doctor the solders. They valued her knowledge of hygiene and heeded her advice to clean up the camps that had become breeding grounds for typhoid fever, measles and other life-threatening diseases.

After the war, when the community was still sharply divided according to their Northern or Southern loyalties, Jarvis united the warring factions by addressing them at an assembly at the Pruntytown Courthouse. She managed to bring the groups together by again appealing to her Mother's Day Work Clubs to use their maternal influence to encourage family members to attend.

Despite warnings for her personal safety, Anne Marie dressed in gray and a friend from Virginia dressed in blue when they addressed the mutinous crowd. The women led the crowd to sing both "Way Down South in Dixie" and "The Star-Spangled Banner," followed by "Auld Lang Syne." The two women embraced and asked the crowd to do the same.

"She got those men to lay down their weapons and hug. She stepped forward over and over," Crow-Dadisman said. "Mrs. Jarvis was a very devout Christian. She really practiced what she preached."

The daughter of a Methodist minister, Anne Marie Jarvis faithfully attended St. Andrews Methodist Church, although her husband, Granville, went to the Baptist church. His father was a Baptist minister.

After nurturing her husband for five years until his death in 1902, a spent Anne Marie Jarvis moved to Philadelphia to live with her son Claude and Anna, who had moved there in 1896. Anna worked for an insurance company in Philadelphia until she reached retirement age.

Anne Marie died in 1905 after receiving round-the-clock nursing provided by her daughter. At her mother's graveside, Anna recalled a wish her mother had made when Anna was still a child. After teaching Anna's 12-year-old Sunday-school class about the biblical figures of Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth, Anne Marie Jarvis said she wished mothers everywhere could have one day off a year, a day in which they would be free of their usual responsibilities and tasks and could just enjoy their families.

Anna sought tirelessly to fulfill her mother's wish. She appealed to St. Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton to declare a Mother's Day, and they held a service in Anne Marie Jarvis' memory two years after her death in 1907.

Anna wrote to legislators, executives and businessmen, asking them to declare a national Mother's Day on which children of all ages would honor their mothers by writing them a letter or visiting with them. She badgered nearly anyone with influence to adopt her cause. A collegiate friendship with Woodrow Wilson bore fruit. As president, he signed a resolution in 1914 proclaiming the second Sunday of every May to be Mother's Day.

Eventually, Anna became disillusioned with the commercialization of Mother's Day. She never intended it to be a day to purchase cards, flowers and gifts, but rather a day to honor mothers. She actually began to call for the repeal of the day.

By 1943, Anna had become a recluse in Philadelphia and refused any requests for interviews, which naturally came to a head in April and May of every year. Her final outings were to candy and card manufacturers and florists.

"She asked them to donate a small percentage of the money they made from her beloved holiday to the poor farms, where many poor mothers and children lived," Crow-Dadisman said. "They refused. She died alone, broken-hearted and broke."

She died in a sanitarium, placed there and paid for by "friends," later revealed to be the Florist Exchange. Today, Mother's Day generates more than $15.5 billion in sales in various industries, according to Crow-Dadisman.

"She wasn't crazy; she was obsessed," Crow-Dadisman said. "There is a difference. She only wanted to honor her mother."

Mother's Day originated to celebrate the organized activities of women outside the home. It became trivialized and commercialized only after it became confined to "special" nuclear family relations.

The people who inspired Mother's Day had quite a different idea about what made mother's special. They believed that motherhood was a political force. They wished to celebrate mothers' special roles as community organizers, honoring women who acted on behalf of the entire future generation rather than simply putting their own children first.

The first proposal of a day for mothers came from Anna Reeves Jarvis, who in 1858 organized Mothers' Work Days in West Virginia [sic] to improve sanitation in the Appalachian Mountains. During the Civil War her group provided medical services for soldiers and civillians on both sides of the conflict. After the war, Jarvis led a campaign to get the former combatants to lay aside their animosities and forge new social and political alliances.

The other nineteenth-century precursor of MOther's Day began in Boston in 1872, when poet and philanthropist Julia War Howe proposed an annual Mother's Day for Peace to be held every June 2:

Arise then, women of this day! ... Say firmly: "Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage.... Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

Howe's Mothers' Day was celebrated widely in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other Eastern states until the turn of the century.

Most of these ceremonies and proposals, significantly, were couched in the plural, not the singular, mode: Mothers' Day was originally a vehicle for organized social and political action by all mothers, not for celebrating hte private services of one's own particular mother.

When Anna Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, began a letter-writing campaign to have a special day set aside for mothers. But by this period there was already considerable pressure to sever the personal meaning of motherhood from its earlier political associations. The mobilization of women as community organizers was the last thing on the minds of the prominent merchants, racist politicians, and antisuffragists who, somtimes to Jarvis's dismay, quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

In fact the adoption of Mother's Day by the 63rd congress on May 8, 1914 represented a reversal of everything the nineteenth-century mothers' days had stood for. The speeches proclaiming Mother's Day in 1914 linked it to celebration of home life and privacy; they repudiated women's social role beyond the household. One antisuffragist leader inverted the original intent entirely when she used the new Mother's Day as an occasion to ask rhetorically: If a woman becomes "a mother to the Municipality, who is going to mother us?" Politicians found that they day provided as many opportunities for self-promotion as did the Fourth of July. Merchants hung testimonials to their own mothers above the wares they hoped to convince customers to buy for other mothers. A day that had once been linked to controversial causes was reduced to an occasion for platitudes and sales pitches.

Its bond with social reform movements broken, Mother's Day immediately drifted into the orbit of the marketing industry. The younger Jarvis had proposed that inexpensive carnations be worn to honor one's mother. Outraged when the flowers began to sell for a dollar apiece, she attacked the florists as "profiteers" and began to campaign to protect Mother's Day from such exploitation. In 1923, she managed to get a political and commercial celebration of Mother's Day cancelled in New York (on grounds, ironically, of infringement of copyright), but this was her last victrory. Jarvis spent the rest of her life trying to regain control of the day, becoming more and more paranoid about those who "would undermine [Mother's Day] with their greed." She was eventually committed to a sanitarium, where she died in 1948.