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Today is Mother’s Day. It’s the day we honor our Mother for putting up with the crap we put them through during our youth and what they might still have to put up with when we reach adulthood.

It’s a day of flowers, cards, and possibly a breakfast they don’t have to cook. A pretty good deal for us children and spouses of these women who spent years taking care of us.

How did Mother’s Day become a holiday and how was it viewed by the woman who started it? The answer below may surprise you. (Reprinted from my post in 2014)

The credit for this country’s Mother’s Day is given to Anna Jarvis of Grafton, West Virginia. Her observance began in 1908 as a day to honor one’s mother, though a few other unsuccessful attempts by other individuals in previous decades failed.

Jarvis wanted to accomplish her mother’s dream of making a celebration for all mothers, although the idea did not take off until she enlisted the services of wealthy Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker, who celebrated it on 8 May 1910 in Bethany Temple Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, PA of which he was the founder. In a letter to the pastor, she said it was, “our first Mother’s Day”.

Jarvis kept promoting the holiday until President Woodrow Wilson made the day an official national holiday in 1914. The holiday eventually became so highly commercialized that many, including its founder, Anna Jarvis, considered it a “Hallmark holiday,” i.e. one with an overwhelming commercial purpose. Jarvis eventually ended up opposing the holiday she had helped to create. This economic modernization was inspired by US models and was sponsored by the state.

Anna Jarvis died in 1948, regretting what had become of her holiday. In the United States, Mother’s Day remains one of the biggest days for sales of flowers, greeting cards, and the like; Mother’s Day is also the biggest holiday for long-distance telephone calls. Moreover, churchgoing is also popular on Mother’s Day, yielding the highest church attendance after Christmas Eve and Easter. Many worshipers celebrate the day with carnations, colored if the mother is living and white if she is dead.

Commercialization

Nine years after the first official United States Mother’s Day, commercialization of the holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become and spent all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration.

Later commercialization and other exploitations of Mother’s Day infuriated Jarvis and she made her criticisms explicitly known the rest of her life. She criticized the practice of purchasing greeting cards, which she saw as a sign of being too lazy to write a personal letter. She was arrested in 1948 for disturbing the peace while protesting against the commercialization of Mother’s Day, and she finally said that she regretted having started it.

Mother’s Day continues to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions.