Happy Mother’s Day
This Sunday is the day we set aside to honor the amazing women who nurtured us and taught us the meaning of unconditional love. Mother’s Day is a reminder to take time and appreciate what matters most, your family!
When I was a child, my elementary school class would work hard to make special cards to bring home in celebration. I loved to draw but never considered myself a talented artist. My horses looked more like funny dogs and my daisies had petals too big for the rest of the flower. I was a little better at tulips but terrible at drawing people. Despite obvious shortcomings, my mom was always so proud to hang my colorful artwork on the refrigerator.
When I was a little older, my mother took a job as the first recycling coordinator for our township. She took night classes to get certifications and worked in a lowly office at the town dump. I never minded visiting her at work. To me, the dump was an intriguing, albeit smelly, mystery. There were bins of old toys and other junk outside the mounds of trash being pushed around by heavy equipment. When my mom wasn’t looking, I liked to rummage through them looking for hidden treasure.
By the time I was a teenager, my mom worked for a city on the Jersey Shore. It was a long drive, but if I went to work with her, I could hang out on the beach, and she sometimes had free passes for the rides on the boardwalk. The catch: you might have to dress up in a costume and walk around handing out fliers for an hour or so. There’s a newspaper article somewhere out there with a picture of me dressed as a ketchup bottle alongside my friend who was kind enough to don a mayonnaise getup.
I also spent more than one Earth Day alongside my mom teaching kids how to make compost. My mother instilled in me a love of gardening. She has an amazing green thumb and a passion for the environment. I may not be able to draw a decent tulip, but I now have a nice row of them adorning my front walkway.
I had always assumed the misshapen stick people holding hands and smiling on my construction paper creations had long ago rotted away in the town dump. One day, when I was an adult, married with children of my own, my mother gave me a keepsake box full of things she had collected from my childhood. There, amongst old report cards and class photos, were the special cards I had made her each year.
Mother’s Day is also a day to appreciate the incredible impact women have had on our society. Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day an official national holiday in 1914, but its roots extend back much further. The day was inspired by a peace activist, Ann Reeves Jarvis from Grafton, West Virginia. Jarvis created “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” to push for improvements in sanitation across the state. Her clubs brought together women over common concerns about the health and wellness of the community. She continued these clubs during the Civil War as a way to help bridge the divide between West Virginia families, as about half of state’s soldiers fought for the Union, while the other half fought for the Confederacy. Anyone familiar with stories of the Hatfields and McCoys is aware of just how divisive the atmosphere in West Virginia was at that time.
At the end of the war, Ann Reeves Jarvis attempted to reconcile families from both sides. In 1865, she organized a “Mother’s Friendship Day” in Pruntytown, West Virginia to bring together soldiers and community members. Despite initial fears, the day was a success and was celebrated annually for several years.
In 1902, Jarvis and her children moved to the Philadelphia area where she passed away in May of 1905. Her daughter Anna dedicated herself to creating a holiday for mothers, to honor her mother, as well as the contributions of women to social reform. She worked with pioneering American merchant John Wanamaker to create the first Mother’s Day celebration on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of her mother’s death, May 10th, 1908. While Anna Jarvis celebrated the holiday by donning a white carnation in honor of her mother and attending church service in Grafton, West Virginia, Wanamaker invited women in Philadelphia to a gathering at the Wanamaker Store Auditorium. Jarvis intended the holiday to be a day of reflection celebrated by attending church services, spending time with your mother, writing kind letters, and expressing gratitude. Florists and Wannemaker saw the holiday as an opportunity to sell cards, flowers, and gifts.
Anna Jarvis continued her push to create a holiday for her mother, writing letters to newspapers and politicians for the next few years. Her idea gained popularity around the country, and Mother’s Day was finally placed on the calendar in 1914, when Woodrow Wilson officially made the second Sunday in May a national holiday. People celebrated by wearing a red or pink carnation if their mother was still alive and a white carnation if she had passed on. Some purchased white carnations to decorate their mother’s gravestones. Florists and stores sold candy, flowers and cards, and soon Anna Jarvis began expressing dismay at the commercialization of what she had meant to be a reflective and reverent holiday. By 1920, she was writing letters to newspapers urging people not to buy candy and flowers. Eventually, she turned to condemning people who bought commercial gift cards as “too lazy” to write a handwritten note and even spent the later years of her life attempting to remove the holiday from the calendar.
The story of Anna Jarvis brings into focus a question we often feel around special occasions. Are we losing the meaning and importance of celebrations by focusing on the wrong things? Is Mother’s Day about buying cards and flowers and going out to a nice restaurant? Thinking back to my childhood, I remember the joy on my mother’s face when I presented her with my handmade cards. I’m still amazed that she kept each one and placed them in a special box for me.
This year, I’m one of the fortunate people who can still wear the red or pink carnation. Writing this blog reminds me that I don’t call my mother enough. One day a year will never be enough to express my gratitude and love. It also reminds me to stop and reflect on the many things women like my mother have contributed to our society. I can’t put a used mayonnaise bottle in the recycling bin without thinking of her hard work.
While Anna Jarvis helped create the holiday to honor her own mother, she meant for it to be a day to acknowledge all that women had done outside the home as well. She wanted to celebrate her mother’s efforts to bring the community together and improve sanitation during the Civil War. She also wanted to highlight other women who fought for social change like the abolition of slavery and reform of prisons and mental health facilities, as well as improvements in the health and welfare of children. At the time of the first Mother’s Day, women were actively fighting for women’s suffrage. Anna Jarvis wanted a day to honor the contributions of women in our society, in the form of social and political “mothers’ groups.”
Thankfully, the tradition of mothers coming together to work for social reform is still alive and well. Today, you can find a plethora of mothers’ activist groups fighting for peace, health, education and more. As you spend time next Sunday celebrating all that your mother has done for you, take a page from Anna Jarvis. Perform acts of kindness, write someone a handwritten letter of gratitude, and reflect on the importance of women in our society.
Mothers groups have accomplished so much for us and still have so much to offer. Happy Mother’s Day!
Authored by We The People Party of Pennsylvania’s interim Communications Officer Cyndy Dayton.