Mother's Day

Mother’s Day was created by a woman who then spent the rest of her life and most of her money trying to shut it down.

The groundwork was her mother’s. Ann Reeves Jarvis organized Mothers’ Day Work Clubs in western Virginia in the 1850s to improve sanitation and reduce infant mortality, tended wounded soldiers from both sides during the Civil War, and afterward held Mothers’ Friendship Day picnics bringing Union and Confederate families back into the same room. That is a specific and unglamorous body of work, and it is the origin the holiday actually comes from.

After her mother died, Anna Jarvis pushed for a day of recognition and held the first observance in Grafton, West Virginia, in May 1908, handing out white carnations because they were her mother’s favorite. She then ran a letter-writing campaign of extraordinary persistence, and Woodrow Wilson signed the national proclamation in 1914.

Within a decade she was at war with it. Florists had discovered that a holiday attached to a specific flower was a windfall and the price of white carnations rose sharply every May. Card companies moved in. Jarvis’s objection was not sentimental fussiness — her point was that a printed card was the opposite of the thing, a way of discharging an obligation without writing a word yourself.

She sued. She organized boycotts. She campaigned against a charity that sold Mother’s Day seals, and against a commemorative stamp. In 1925 she was arrested for disturbing the peace at a confectioners’ convention in Philadelphia. She spent her inheritance on the fight, went deaf, and died in 1948 in a sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Reporting afterward held that her bills there had been paid, quietly, by people in the floral industry.

The white carnation is the detail that runs through the photographs. The original convention was that a white flower honored a mother who had died and a red or pink one a mother still living, and church congregations were photographed wearing them on the lapel. That distinction faded but the flower stayed.

Jarvis was also specific about the punctuation, which sounds like a small thing and was not. She insisted on Mother’s Day, singular possessive, because the day was meant for each person to honor their own mother rather than mothers generally. Nearly every printed use of it, then and now, gets that wrong.

The archive material for this category is mostly indirect and that is worth being honest about. There are few photographs of Mother’s Day as an event. What exists in quantity is the visual world the holiday drew on and the card trade borrowed from — studio portraits of mothers with children, family groups on porches, women at work in kitchens and gardens, and the enormous nineteenth-century output of sentimental prints on domestic themes.

Those are the images that fill this category, and they are better material than the holiday itself provides. A portrait of a woman with three children on a farmhouse step in 1905 carries more than any staged commemorative picture ever did.

Sixty-Two Years to Be Taken Seriously