Today is Mother’s Day.
My beautiful mother had more friends than anyone I ever knew. She was the life of every party. All of my friends loved my mother and viewed her as their best friend- same with my brother and my sister’s friends.
Inside, my mother was a tortured soul, made so by her Puritan parents, who made her a bit frigid, according to what she told me. She had married the man of her mother’s dreams, who turned out to be a womanizer, and they both ended up drinking a lot of vodka, starting with a morning screwdriver or Bloody Mary, and ending the day with same.
My mother died of cancer, which had started in her lungs, when I was in law school, and her doctor told my father and his brother, but not my mother, that she had cancer and it was well progressed and there was nothing that could be done. My mother’s friends were shocked to learn she was dying of cancer and nothing could be done about it. She shut them all out and forbade me to tell anyone she was dying. It was surreal, I did other things and did not participate in her dying.
When I was young, my mother told me that she started smoking two packs of Pall Malls a day at age 15, to rebel against her Puritan parents; and she told me when I was in high school that she wrote to my father in college, if he did not come home and marry her and save her from her parents, she would marry the first man who would have her; and she told me when I was in college that she had called off the divorce with my father, because her mother had told her, “If you divorce Sloan, it will kill me!” Cancer divorced her from them both.
I never smoked a cigarette. My mother cured me of wanting to do that, because our home and her car always smelled like cigarette smoke.
She invented Mother’s Day — then waged a lifelong campaign against itBY KRISTINE PHILLIPSMay 11, 2024
While dining at a Philadelphia tearoom owned by her friend John Wanamaker, Anna Jarvis ordered a salad — then dumped it on the floor.
Jarvis hated that the dish was called “Mother’s Day Salad,” named after a celebration of mothers that she had pioneered years earlier.
The strong-willed woman saw it not as an honor but an affront to a tradition she held so dear. To her, it was a cheap marketing gimmick to profit off an idea that she considered to be hers, and hers alone.
The incident was recounted in a newspaper article published sometime in the early 1900s, years after Jarvis organized the first Mother’s Day service in the country, said Katharine Antolini, a historian who has studied Jarvis and how Mother’s Day became a national holiday.
Jarvis spent decades fighting an uphill battle to keep Mother’s Day from becoming the commercialized holiday that it is today. To her, it was simply a day to honor mothers, and she started it to commemorate her own. So when people co-opted her idea for other purposes, Jarvis was incensed.
She started fights, threatened lawsuits, wrote letters to politicians, issued bitter news releases, organized protests, fought with Eleanor Roosevelt, and demanded audiences with presidents, among other actions.
She even claimed legal copyright to the holiday, Antolini said. Her letters were signed “Anna Jarvis, Founder of Mother’s Day.”
“It became a part of her identity,” the historian said. “It was completely tied up in her ego.”
The fight that consumed Jarvis was waged in vain, and her campaign drained the modest fortune she’d inherited from her family. She died in a sanitarium in 1948 at age 84 — alone, blind and penniless.
If she were alive today, Antolini said, Jarvis would have been thrilled that Mother’s Day remains popular.
“But she’d be upset that people don’t remember her,” the historian said.
She would probably be equally angered to know that the holiday is celebrated in part through Mother’s Day specials and sales, Hallmark cards and floral arrangements.
Antolini, chair of the history department at West Virginia Wesleyan College, said she began studying Jarvis and the history of Mother’s Day in the 1990s, when she visited the International Mother’s Day Shrine, in Grafton, W.Va. It’s a museum of the church where the first Mother’s Day service was held.
In the church’s kitchen area, Antolini said, she found several boxes of documents that belonged to Jarvis. She volunteered to archive them and spent months poring over the records.
She learned about the childless woman who dedicated her life to the obsessive pursuit of creating a holiday for mothers.
“The surface image of her is that she was this crazy spinster who dedicated her life to this movement and fought everybody who tried to take her day away from her,” Antolini said. “It was her life to create this holiday, to perpetuate it and have it spread nationally.”Jarvis, born in Webster, W.Va., was inspired to create Mother’s Day by her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, a Sunday school teacher who helped start Mother’s Day Work Clubs to teach women how to care for their children.After one lecture in 1876, Ann Reeves Jarvis prayed that somebody would create a day commemorating mothers for their service to humanity, Antolini said.
Twelve-year-old Anna Jarvis remembered that.
Her mother died in 1905, and Jarvis, then in her 40s, promised at her gravesite that she’d be the one to answer her prayer.
Over the next years, Jarvis embarked on a relentless letter-writing campaign to persuade the governor of every state to declare the second Sunday of May — the closest Sunday to her mother’s death anniversary — Mother’s Day.
She wrote to Mark Twain, President Theodore Roosevelt and any other powerful figure she could think of to help with her cause, Antolini said. She also sought the help of Wanamaker, the Philadelphia businessman and her friend.
At one point, she incorporated the Mother’s Day International Association. It’s unclear whether the corporation had other members, according to the obituary.
Even charities became the target of her disdain. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, charities held fundraising events on Mother’s Day to help mothers in need. Jarvis resented that.
“She didn’t want it to be a beggar’s day,” Antolini said. “She didn’t want the day to be turned into just another charity event. You don’t pity mothers; you honor them.”
In studying Jarvis, Antolini came to sympathize with the tenacious and fiercely independent woman who remained single and childless at a time when women were expected to do the opposite.
“You get behind the motivation for why she’s doing it. She doesn’t sound crazy. Her argument is sound,” Antolini said. “Many times, you’d feel she’s justified in being angered about these things.”
But she also felt that Jarvis had a narrow view of what motherhood is about. Hers was the perspective of a child, of a daughter who deeply loved her mother.
“Children have a very simplistic view of motherhood,” Antolini said. “Those women who then would become mothers, they have a completely different view of motherhood. It’s becoming politically active to save the lives of mothers of other children.”
By the early 1940s, Jarvis had become undernourished and was losing her eyesight. Friends and associates placed her in a sanitarium in West Chester, Pa. She died Nov. 24, 1948.
Mother’s Day has become one of the most profitable U.S. holidays, with annual spending steadily growing since 2006. This year, consumers are expected to spend a near-record $33.5 billion, according to the National Retail Federation.
We can imagine how Jarvis would feel about that.A version of this story was originally published on May 14, 2017.
The Yorktown SentryA Student Newspaper of Yorktown High SchoolA Brief History Of Christmas And Its CommercializationMason Wolverton, Staff ReporterDecember 16, 2022For many people, the Christmas season means ornaments hanging from trees, stockings lining fireplaces and joyful music filling the air. In addition, millions brace themselves for the month of constant marketing messages and spending. This hasn’t always been the case.Different cultures have long celebrated the winter solstice, which falls on December 21. The origin of Christmas itself can be traced back to ancient Rome, where it evolved from a winter holiday called Saturnalia. In the fourth century, there was a push to weaken non-Christian traditions, and Saturnalia was seen as a perfect basis for a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. It included gift exchanging, candle lighting, decorating, feasting and singing, which all evolved into Christmas traditions.The holiday developed across many different cultures to reach the point it has today. One of its staples—Santa Claus—was inspired by St. Nicholas: a real person. Born in third-century Turkey, he was known for his kindness and generosity toward less fortunate people. Advent calendars and wreaths, among other common Christmas celebrations, came from cultures in Germany and Austria.These traditions made their way to the United States on several avenues. Dutch immigrants brought the legend of Santa to New York in the 1600s, and Germans brought Christmas trees in the 1700s.The holiday started to gain serious traction in the U.S. when Washington Irving, an Englishman who’d settled in New York City, published a series of stories describing Christmas traditions of old. The holiday’s momentum in America was accelerated even more when Clement Clark Moore coined the idea of Santa Claus riding a sleigh through the air in a story called An Account of a Visit From Santa Claus, which is now known as The Night Before Christmas.In the 1840s, marketers began to see Christmas as a prime opportunity to sell goods. Depictions of Santa were associated with advertisements in big cities like New York City and Boston, and the first in-store Santa appeared at Macy’s in 1862.The commercial ties of the holiday only grew from there. In the early-to-mid 1900s, mass advertising campaigns full of holiday tunes and colorful decorations filled the radio airways and storefronts, and Macy’s looked to signal the beginning of the holiday (spending) season with its first Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924.Thousands of movies and songs later, Americans are spending more money on Christmas than ever before. In 2021, a combined $886.7 billion dollars was spent on the holiday, a number that has climbed each of the last 20 years other than 2008.There’s no denying that Christmas has become an uber-commercialized holiday. For the most part, that can be a good thing; after all, the holiday season is the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. However, for some, it can be frustrating to see the holiday detach further from its purpose in favor of cash.
No comments:
Post a Comment