The Real History of Mother's Day Is Surprisingly Dark

Mother’s Day is supposed to be wholesome and sort of boring: some flowers, a Hallmark card, maybe doing some chores around the house for once. But the American version of Mother's Day wasn’t born in a garden. It was forged in the smoke and death of the Civil War, shaped by radical women, and became a battleground between profit and principle—a holiday so contentious its own creator devoted her life trying to destroy it. Mother's Day's history is dramatic as hell.

The ancient ancestors of Mother's Day

Moms have been around for a long time, and so have celebrations to honor them. These kinds of celebrations have been around at least since the ancient Greeks and Romans threw festivals in honor of mother goddesses like Cybele and Rhea. During the Medieval period, the church put a Christian spin on the idea with Mothering Sunday, a day honoring the Mother Church. Versions of Mother's Day are celebrated on different days and different ways around the world. In Peru, you visit cemeteries on Mother's Day. In Albania, you celebrate your mom on March 8. But these other "Mother's Days" aren't the direct inspiration for Mother's Day as we celebrate it in the United States.

A holiday born in blood

Mother's Day officially began in the United States in 1914, but the roots of the holiday day go back to before the Civil War, back to social activist and community organizer, Ann Reeves Jarvis. "Mother Jarvis" (as she was called) was a founder and champion of Mothers' Day Work Clubs, grassroots public health organizations dedicated to lowering infant mortality rates by teaching women how to properly care for their children, improve sanitary conditions, and fight disease. This was a personal crusade for "Mother Jarvis": She birthed between 11 and 13 children, and only four survived to adulthood.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Mothers' Day Work Clubs shifted their focus to caring for wounded soldiers on both sides of the conflict. By 1868, with the Civil War over, Jarvis promoted a peace-focused movement for “Mothers’ Friendship Day," dedicated to bringing bringing former Union and Confederate soldiers together to reconcile.

“Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?” Jarvis wrote. (Yeah, why don't they? Get on it, Mom.)

Jarvis wasn't alone. Across the country, other women were also organizing proto-Mother's Days. Abolitionist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation” in 1870, which called on all mothers to unite and promote world peace. Howe later campaigned for a holiday called “Mother’s Peace Day” to be celebrated every June 2. Juliet Calhoun Blakely, a temperance activist from Michigan, inspired a local Mother’s Day to be celebrated there in the 1870s. The cultural winds were blowing toward Mother's Day, but it took Jarvis' death to make it official.

Ann Reeves Jarvis died in 1905 (sadly without having ended war) but her daughter, Anna Jarvis, picked up the activist mantle. On the first anniversary of her mom's death, Anna announced plans for a memorial service remembering her mother to be held the following year. She envisioned a national holiday to honor the sacrifices mothers make for their children. In 1908, Jarvis, with financial backing from fat cats John Wanamaker and H.J. Heinz, hosted an official Mother’s Day celebration at a church in West Virginia—and at Wanamaker's department store. They both went well, inspiring Jarvis to push for a national holiday. But it also gave Wanamaker and other go-getters a look at the profit potential of Mother's Day, and thus began the battle for the soul of Mother's Day.

Mother's Day goes commercial

By 1912, Jarvis had quit her job and started the Mother’s Day International Association, which formed partnerships with local businesses and ran letter-writing campaigns to government officials. Towns and churches in several states adopted Mother’s Day as an annual holiday, and by 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made it an official holiday in 1914. There were a few haters, like Senator Henry Moore Teller (D-CO) who called the resolution “puerile" and “absolutely absurd,” but most people loved the idea.

So Jarvis got what she wanted and everything turned out great. Wait. That didn't happen at all. Jarvis saw Mother's Day as a "day of sentiment, not profit," but capitalists like Wanamaker and Heinz did not care what she thought. They quickly capitalized on the widespread interest in the holiday, and the celebration almost immediately went from a meaningful day to honor the sacrifices mother's make and promote peace to a chance to buy a lot of things for your mom. Jarvis hated this.

Ann Jarvis' quixotic campaign against Mother's Day

By 1920, Jarvis had denounced her former financial backers, called on everyone to not buy their moms anything on Mother's Day, and categorized anyone who makes money off the holiday as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest, and truest movements and celebrations.”

Jarvis showed her disapproval for restaurants offering specials on Mother's Day by throwing a "Mother's Day Salad" on the floor of a Philadelphia eatery. She didn't approve of greeting cards either, writing, “A maudlin, insincere printed card or ready-made telegram means nothing except that you’re too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone else in the world." And don't give your mom candy on Mother's Day either: "Candy!" Jarvis wrote, "You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.”

But the worst Mother's Day offenders of all, the biggest racketeers and pirates, were the damn florists. Jarvis freakin' hated the flower industry. At her own expense, she sent thousands of buttons featuring a picture of a white carnation (the official flower of Mother's Day) to women's groups all over the country in a bid to have them not buy any flowers. She threatened a trademark lawsuit against Florist Telegraph Delivery (FTD) for combining carnations with the words "Mother's Day." She protested the U.S. government's Mother's Day stamp because it used the painting Whistler's Mother, and she interpreted the carnations in it as an advertisement for Big Flower. Jarvis was even arrested for disturbing the peace when she tried to physically stop the sale of carnations.

The sad, lonely death of the mother of Mother's Day

Say what you will about her, Ann Jarvis was committed (literally). Calling the backers of your holiday "kidnappers" and "termites" comes with a price, and Jarvis paid it in full. By mid-century, she was penniless, living in her sister's house in Philadelphia without any trace of the influence that once swayed the President of the United States. In 1943, while trying to collect signatures on a petition to abolish Mother’s Day completely, Jarvis was forced into the Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where representatives of the Flower and Greeting Card industry paid the bill. Whether this was a corporate public relations move to provide (no doubt much needed) psychiatric care to a difficult but important figure in the industry, or a final twist of the knife depends on your point of view. Jarvis died on November 24, 1948, never having children of her own, but she took her principles to her carnation-scented grave.