Mother’s Day is observed annually in May. A mother is more than just a person; she is the heartbeat of the family, the anchor of our souls, with arms made of tenderness and a heart stitched with love. To commemorate this difficult, unpaid job of motherhood, Mother’s Day is observed to show love, appreciation, and recognition for her irreplaceable role in a family.
Anna Jarvis, the creator of Mother’s Day, opposed its commercialization
But did you know that Anna Jarvis, the creator of Mother’s Day, opposed its commercialization and even attempted to have it repealed?
US resident Anna Jarvis celebrated the first Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of May 1908 to honor her mother, who died in 1905. It became a US national holiday in 1914. She was against the day’s commercialization and started protesting against florists. In 1925, she was arrested for protesting against an organization that used Mother’s Day to raise funds.
Anna Jarvis was born in Webster, West Virginia, in 1864. Her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, was a Sunday school teacher who helped start Mother’s Day work clubs. At these clubs, the young women were purportedly taught how to care for their children.
According to US historians, Ann Reeves Jarvis pleaded in 1876 for someone to create a day to honor mothers for their contributions to mankind. Anna, at 12, remembered her mother’s prayer. Her mother died in 1905.
Jarvis, then in her forties, promised at her burial that she would be the one to answer her plea.
Jarvis then wrote letter after letter to the governor of every US state to declare the second Sunday of May, the closest Sunday to her mother’s death, as Mother’s Day.
Three years later, the first Mother’s Day service was held one morning in 1908 at St. Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, Wisconsin. Anna bought hundreds of carnations, her mother’s favorite flower, for the service, the Washington Post reported.
West Virginia first declared Mother’s Day a holiday in 1910, and other states soon followed suit.
The United States Congress established Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of May
However, Jarvis planned to make Mother’s Day a national holiday in the United States, and she continued to write to subsequent presidents in support of this goal.
In 1914, the United States Congress established Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of May. Mother’s Day became a worldwide cause, but it was not exactly the one Jarvis had in mind.
She spent the next decades of her life fighting against flower shop owners, cardmakers, and the candy industry for profiting off the holiday.
“They’re commercializing my Mother’s Day,” she complained in a letter to newspapers, according to a 1986 Washington Post story.
“This is not what I intended.”
Jarvis passed away in 1948 without any money or inheritance. She lived as an independent woman who remained single and childless at a time when women were expected to be the exact opposite.