The founder of Mother's Day spent years fighting the card and flower sellers
Anna Jarvis created the American Mother's Day in 1908 as a church service honouring her late mother. Within two decades she was organising boycotts, threatening lawsuits against companies, and getting arrested for disturbing the peace while protesting against carnation sales. She wanted handwritten letters, not store-bought cards.
Her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, had nursed wounded soldiers from both sides of the American Civil War and run clubs tackling public health problems. Together with the suffragist Julia Ward Howe, who issued a Mother's Day Proclamation for peace in 1870, she had campaigned for mothers to unite against war. When Ann died in 1905, her daughter began pushing for a day that would honour every mother as the person who had done more for you than anyone else.
The first service took place in 1908 at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, now the International Mother's Day Shrine. That same year Congress turned the idea down, joking that it would then need a Mother-in-law's Day. Yet by 1911 every state observed it, and in 1914 Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May a national holiday. Jarvis insisted on the singular possessive, so that each family would honour its own mother, and in 1912 she even trademarked a phrase naming herself as founder.
By the early 1920s, Hallmark and other firms were selling Mother's Day cards. Jarvis felt her idea had been exploited for profit, and she protested at a Philadelphia candy makers' convention in 1923 and at a meeting of the American War Mothers in 1925, whose carnation fundraising led to her arrest.
Around the world the date wanders. Most Arab countries mark it on 21 March, a custom begun in Egypt by the journalist Mustafa Amin in 1956. Bolivia uses May 27, remembering women who fought to defend their children, and Argentina alone chooses the third Sunday of October. Australians, celebrating in autumn when carnations are out of season, give white chrysanthemums instead. In Nepal, the Hindu observance Mata Tirtha Aunshi honours mothers with special foods and predates the American holiday by centuries, while Britain revived Mothering Sunday thanks to Constance Adelaide Smith.
Source: Mother's Day
