Anna Jarvis: Creator of Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is celebrated all over the world but often on different days. Anna Jarvis (May 1, 1864 – November 24, 1948) created the holiday in the United States, but she would come to regret her invention. Her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, was her inspiration and the “mother” of Mother’s Day.

Anna Jarvis created Mother’s Day in the United States in memory of her mother, but later was so upset by how commercial she felt the holiday became that she actually campaigned to abolish the holiday. Another irony is that Anna Jarvis never married and never had children.

In 1858, Anna’s mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis was an early social activist in her Appalachian town of Grafton, West Virginia. The mother of eleven children of whom only four survived, she was appalled at the high infant and child mortality rate in her community. With the blessing of local doctors, she organized “’Mother’s Day Work Clubs” to help educate mothers about the relationship between hygiene, sanitation, and disease. She taught them to boil water before drinking, to quarantine family members to keep disease from spreading into the community and provided medicines and supplies to the sick and poor.

During the Civil War, Ann Reeves vowed that the Clubs would rise above Union and Confederate loyalties and would tend to the wounded of both sides. She wrote that “friendship and goodwill should obtain for the duration and aftermath of the war…we are composed of the Blue and the Gray.”

After the war ended, she organized a Mother’s Friendship Day for mothers and neighbors to promote reconciliation, an event that continued for years in the community.

Ann Reeves also taught Sunday school and one prayer made a profound impact on her 12-year-old daughter, Anna. At the end of a “Mothers of the Bible” lesson, Ann Reeves said, “I hope and pray that someone, someday will found a memorial Mother’s Day to commemorate the mother for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life. She deserves it.”

Anna Jarvis never forgot that prayer and at her mother’s funeral in 1905, she promised, “By the grace of God, you shall have that Mother’s Day.” On the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death, Anna Jarvis held a memorial where she praised her mother’s life of devotion to community service and family.

It was the kickoff to a three-year letter writing campaign to state governors, newspaper editors, and prominent figures, including Mark Twain and ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. She made speeches and visits to politicians, church groups, anyone who would listen to her idea for a Mother’s Day holiday.

Jarvis even left her job with an insurance agency in Philadelphia to devote herself full-time to making it happen. Her first break came when John Wannamaker, the wealthy department store merchant threw his support behind the movement. In 1908, the first Mother’s Day ceremonies were held at his store in Philadelphia and at the Andrews Episcopal Church in Grafton where Ann Reeves’ funeral had been held.

The movement took off from there. Within a year, 45 states were celebrating Mother’s Day. Jarvis created the Mother’s Day International Association to continue to press for a national declaration of the holiday. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation that the second Sunday in May would become a holiday called Mother’s Day. Anna suggested that date because it was the closest to her mother’s May 9th death.

In 1915, the popular holiday crossed the border into Canada. Today, hundreds of countries around the globe have annual holidays that celebrate mothers on different dates.

Jarvis’ idea of honoring mothers was a simple one – attending church services and writing a heartfelt letter expressing love and gratitude for a mother’s sacrifices and devotion. She chose a white carnation, her mother’s favorite flower, to wear as a symbol of the holiday.

For the first few years, Jarvis worked with the floral industry to promote Mother’s Day, but when the cost of carnations, candy and cards spiraled every May, she became angry. The sentimental intent of Mother’s Day was being ruined by commercialism and profit, she said. She threatened to sue the industry and even tried trademarking the image of the carnation unsuccessfully.

In response, the Florist Telegraph Delivery (FTD) association offered her a commission on Mother’s Day sales, which further enraged Jarvis. In 1922, she urged people to boycott buying flowers. She wrote, “what will you do to rout the charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, truest and noblest of celebrations?”

In 1923, she turned her ire on the candy industry, crashing a retail confection convention to protest their Mother’s Day sales.

She even opposed using Mother’s Day as an opportunity to help charities that supported poor and deserving women. When the American War Mothers held a fund-raiser on Mother’s Day at their convention in 1925, Jarvis stormed the event and was arrested for disturbing the peace. The holiday was dragged into the American suffrage movement when people on both sides of the issue began debating the role of mothers in society.

There were no limits to Jarvis’ opposition. When the Postal Service issued a commemorative Mother’s Day stamp in 1934 featuring a copy of “Whistler’s Mother” with a vase of carnations, she saw it as a blatant ad for the floral industry. In 1935, she even tangled with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, accusing her of “crafty plotting” for using Mother’s Day as a fund-raiser to help combat high maternal and child mortality rates. Ironically, those were the same issues that her own mother worked on in her lifetime.

Jarvis copyrighted the phrase, “Second Sunday in May, Mother’s Day” and threatened to sue anyone who used it. At one point in 1944, a Newsweek article claimed she had 33 pending lawsuits. When nothing seemed to stop the tide of marketing, Jarvis publicly disowned the holiday and went door to door to get signatures to try and get it abolished. She and her sister spent their savings trying to un-do the holiday they had so passionately created.

She died at 84 in 1948 at a sanitorium in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The Anna Jarvis House, her childhood home in Grafton, West Virginia is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Jarvis had a remarkably simple idea to honor mothers but regretted what it had become once it became popular. The National Retail Federation estimates Americans will spend nearly $36 billion on Mother’s Day and $20 billion on Father’s Day holidays in 2023.

©2023 Alice Look
Co-founder, Remarkable Women Project.org
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project