Ah, Mother’s Day. That sentimental day of lavish bouquets, fancy chocolates and store-bought greetings.
It’s become just what Anna Marie Jarvis feared it might.
When the special day’s founder visited Akron in May 1925 as the special guest of High Street Church of Christ, she voiced concern that Mother’s Day was becoming too commercialized.
Florists, candy makers and greeting-card businesses were exploiting the day for profit and gouging the public with inflated prices, Jarvis complained.
“What do you see on the day following Mother’s Day?” she asked. “Wilted flowers, empty candy boxes, broken greeting cards. What a travesty on the real spirit of the day. If you really love your mother, you can’t express that love by giving her a box of candy.”
Jarvis (1864-1948), a West Virginia native who resided in Philadelphia, was 61 years old when she traveled by train to Akron for Mother’s Day weekend. A year earlier, she had been Boston’s guest for the holiday — although she declined to call it as such.
“It is not a holiday,” she insisted. “We don’t want the day to become merely a holiday. It is much more. We want it to be observed from the heart, as the universal expression of love and reverence for the sanctity of motherhood.”
Guest of honor
During her Akron visit, Jarvis stayed at the Portage Hotel at Main and Market streets. Her busy itinerary included being the guest of honor Friday, May 8, for a banquet at High Street Church of Christ. On Saturday, she attended a tea presented by the women of Trinity Lutheran Church, visited Gertrude Seiberling at Stan Hywet Hall and dined at a banquet sponsored by the Censowe clubs of the YWCA. On Sunday, she addressed the congregation of Madison Avenue Evangelical Church.
In her speaking engagements, Jarvis’ blue eyes turned misty when she spoke of her saintly mom, Ann Reeves Jarvis (1835-1905), a Sunday school teacher, social activist and mother of 11 children.
“My mother was kind and sweet and gentle and good,” she told the Akron Times-Press. “Her whole life was spent in helping others. She loved everybody, but especially children. She used to say that when she died she wanted to go to a corner of heaven where the children and the flowers are.”
In 1908, Jarvis held a memorial service for her mother at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, W.Va., and lobbied for the United States to set aside one day a year to honor family matriarchs. “I was jeered at,” she recalled. “Congress made fun of me.”
But communities across the nation embraced the idea, and lawmakers caved to public demand. On May 8, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation after the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives approved a joint resolution designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day and honoring “the American mother” as “the greatest source of the country’s strength and inspiration.”
White carnation
As a symbol of Mother’s Day, Jarvis touted the white carnation as a representation of purity and goodness. She frowned upon any other colors.
“Wearing of red carnations for living mothers and white ones for mothers who have passed away is merely a custom fostered by florists,” she told an Akron audience. “All mothers are living. Motherhood does not perish, and the love of mothers is a living, vital factor in the hearts of every person of every age. One flower is the tribute to all mothers, alive or dead.”
But flowers could be costly or scarce, so Jarvis advocated the wearing of a white celluloid badge depicting a single carnation and the words “Mother’s Day.” Jarvis, who never married or had any children of her own, served as president of the International Mother’s Day Association, which sold the white badges for $2 per 100 as a fundraiser to honor mothers and find housing for orphans and homeless people. She sold them out of her hotel room before hopping a train back to Philadelphia.
Before anyone dared to cluck a tongue, Jarvis was quick to point out that her group operated without any funds whatsoever and that none of the officers received any salaries.
“Does it seem just that other people, other organizations, should use our idea to make money for themselves?” she asked.
Jarvis gave away dozens and dozens of those badges during her visit here. Some of those who attended her 1925 lectures probably handed down those emblems to their descendants. Check your junk drawers.
Anna Marie Jarvis was deeply proud that Mother’s Day had swept the country, but she refused to take all the credit for its popularity.
“My mother founded the day,” Jarvis said. “I am only carrying on what she started.”
Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.