How Mothers Have Their Day

The Remarkable Efforts of Anna Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe

By Khen Lim



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Known widely as the inspirer behind the Mother’s Day holiday first recognised in America, Anna Jarvis was the tenth of thirteen children born to Granville and Ann Jarvis in 1864. Seven of her siblings had actually died before she was even born. She was also known as Ann Reeves Jarvis.

During the American Civil War, Jarvis was no ordinary social activist but one who was outspoken and unifying within the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church community. She was also, by then, a founder of the Mothers’ Day Work Clubs. 

In fact it was during one of her Sunday school lessons in 1876 that she was inspired with the Mother’s Day event and she ended her class praying, “I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial Mother’s Day commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life. She is entitled to it.”

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Throughout her life, Jarvis was close to her mother. Even through the years in which she worked away from home, she maintained close correspondence with her. From working in the public school system, Jarvis went on to become a bank teller in Chattanooga and later as a literary and advertising editor in Philadelphia (first female in the agency to do so). All through, she and her brother remained concern over their mother’s declining health so much so that she would spend the majority of her time caring for her until her death in 1905.

Three years following her mother’s death, Jarvis hosted a memorial ceremony to honour her and all mothers at the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, which today is where the International Mother’s Day Shrine is located, in Grafton, West Virginia, a National Historic Landmark since 1992. This was to be, in hindsight, the first official observation of Mother’s Day.

In the years that followed, Jarvis went on a personal mission to push for the recognition of ‘Mother’s Day’ as a holiday worthy of commemoration and celebration. She spent much of her personal time corresponding with numerous businesspeople, church groups, government authorities and political leaders throughout the country to recognise the day. To do that, she even quit her position at the agency in Philadelphia.

By 1912, her personal pursuit resulted in the incorporation of the Mother’s Day International Association (MDIA) in order to push the agenda nationally and globally. This effort resulted in a campaign coverage that spanned through every state in America including Canada, Mexico, China and Japan as well as Latin America and the African continent. Her expansive dedication to the cause earned her due recognition by President Woodrow Wilson who finally proclaimed Mother’s Day a national holiday in 1914.

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Even after this monumental achievement, Jarvis continued to invest her passion to lead the commemorative day and continued to foster the belief that the day must be set aside to honour all mothers. The sentimental significance was complemented by Jarvis’ preference for the white carnation as the emblematic symbol for Mother’s Day. Of the choice, she said: 

“Its whiteness is to symbolise the truth, purity and broad charity of mother love; its fragrance, her memory and her prayers. The carnation does not drop its petals, but hugs them to its heart as it dies and so, too, mothers hug their children to their hearts, their mother love never dying. When I selected this flower, I was remembering my mother’s bed of white pinks.”

But inevitably, she was to struggle to head off the burgeoning powers of commercialisation where her spiritual ideals would meet head-on with the forces that churned out millions of confection, decorative florals and bouquets and the monstrous greeting card industry. And in all of these, the threat that would render her original message into insignificance was very real.

The commercial exploitation of Mother’s Day was such that even Jarvis’ ideal white carnation became no more a symbol than when the red carnations were introduced as an alternative. In the meantime, the whites were becoming very expensive as florists undermined the demand for it during this holiday. Eventually, against Jarvis’ intentions, it was the industry that enforced the symbolism that the white carnations were to honour deceased mothers while the red ones were for living mothers.

Jarvis’ struggle against the stampeding commercial forces would eventually lead to her own economic hardship. Eventually a spent force, she joined her sister Lillie in 1944 at the Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania where she passed away four years later.

She was buried alongside her beloved mother as well as her sister and brother in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

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Ironically, working along but separately was a woman called Julia Ward Howe who also appealed to women to unite for peace throughout the world. Eventually called, the ‘Appeal to Womanhood throughout the World’ – later shortened to ‘Mother’s Day Proclamation’ – Howe composed it in September 1870 as a pacifist response to the tragedies of the U.S. Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War.

Like Jarvis, Howe had also appealed for an annual official celebration of ‘Mother’s Day for Peace’ but unlike her, she was not successful. Even while Jarvis went on to have her Mother’s Day officially ratified, Howe’s declaration was never forgotten. Here is the 1870 proclamation in its fullest version:

“Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers have been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battlefield. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard and answered to as never before.

“Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

“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.

“From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonour nor violence indicate possession.

“As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

“In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient, and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

- Julie Ward Howe (September 1870)

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Happy Mother's Day 2015 to all our readers who are mothers throughout the world.