It’s hard to imagine how anyone could get riled up by a Hallmark card showing a serene mother clutching roses, but that’s only if you don’t know the story of Anna Jarvis.
She’s the person most credited with turning the second Sunday of May into Mother’s Day, which this year celebrates a milestone: 100 years.
But another person who helped launch the national holiday, with the stroke of a pen on a proclamation, was the U.S. president in 1914, Woodrow Wilson.
Take all of that — Mother’s Day, vintage Hallmark cards and President Wilson — and you have two new exhibits: one in Kansas City, Missouri, at the Hallmark Visitors Center, and one in Staunton, Virginia, at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library &Museum.
Give Hallmark credit for including in its display a thank-you letter from Jarvis to Wilson, because Jarvis was no fan of card makers.
In her view, the holiday she crusaded for — a day she’d hoped would be reverential and contemplative — was ruined by commercialization as early as the 1920s.
By some accounts, she spent the rest of her life trying to take back, actually rescind, Mother’s Day.
“A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” Jarvis reportedly said.
She’s said to have called florists and the makers of greeting cards and candy “charlatans, bandits, pirates” and even … termites.
She had a way with words, that Anna Jarvis.
Mother’s Day was part of the broader movement toward women’s rights and equality in the 1860s and ’70s. Julia Ward Howe’s 1870 poem “A Mother’s Day Proclamation,” coming just after the carnage of the Civil War, was really a call for peace.
Anna Jarvis’ mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, was an activist who offered medical care to soldiers of both sides during the war, primarily in West Virginia.
She organized Mothers’ Day work clubs, aid organizations that tried to lower infant mortality, among other public health projects.
It was her death on May 9, 1905, that led to what we know as Mother’s Day.
The campaign for an official Mother’s Day would slowly build, starting with proclamations by communities in West Virginia, then spreading to other cities and states.
And on May 8, 1914, the U.S. Congress, in a joint resolution, established the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day. The next day, Wilson issued a proclamation.
Jarvis thanked the president in a letter. Mother’s Day, she wrote, would be “a great Home Day of our country for sons and daughters to honor their mothers and fathers and homes in a way that will perpetuate family ties and give emphasis to true home life.”
The holiday she worked so hard for was supposed to be about sentiment, not profit.
Jarvis started complaining almost right away about how the day was being misinterpreted.
She organized boycotts and threatened lawsuits to try to stop the commercialization.
She crashed a candymakers convention in Philadelphia in 1923. Two years later she did the same at a confab of the American War Mothers, which raised money by selling carnations, the flower associated with Mother’s Day.
That time, Jarvis was arrested for disturbing the peace.
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