PLAINFIELD TODAY: A Mother's Day Surprise

Sunday, May 13, 2007

A Mother's Day Surprise

Anna Marie Jarvis,
founder of Mother's Day

Would you be surprised to learn that Mother's Day as we know it bears almost no resemblance to the Mother's Day envisioned by those who began the custom?

The Mother's Day we celebrate on the second Sunday in May was begun by Anna Marie Jarvis in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1907, to honor the memory of her mother Ann Jarvis, who had passed away in 1905.

But not as some sentimental day in which Mom gets flowers and candy, and maybe breakfast in bed, or dinner at a jampacked restaurant.

No, Anna Marie Jarvis wanted to honor her mother, who had been active in tending the wounded of both sides during the Civil War, for having been a leader in Mother's Day campaigns for peace and worker's safety and health from the end of that war to her death.

These Mother's Day celebrations were the direct outgrowth of a day proclaimed in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe.

Howe, an ardent abolitionist, social activist, and author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" envisioned it as a day for women to unite and foster peace and disarmament --

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"... Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
... As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...

Anna Marie Jarvis campaigned for a national celebration of the day, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation calling for national observance.

The campaign to publicize the observance was underwritten by John Wanamaker -- of the Philadelphia department store.

As the campaign broadened, it lost its original focus and became instead an enormously successful commercial marketing vehicle as a day of general appreciation of mothers.

Jarvis was so upset and disappointed in the way events had conspired to rob Mother's Day of its original meaning that she and her sister devoted the rest of their lives, and their resources, to campaigning AGAINST the holiday. They both died in poverty.

In 2007, in the midst of a vastly unpopular war, with more than 3,300 American dead and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casulties, there could hardly be a more appropriate time to recall the ORIGINS of our Mother's Day observance.

It is not Hallmark that has taken up the fallen banner of Jarvis and Howe and the others. Today, it is groups like the Gold Star Families for Peace and Military Families Speak Out that are bearing witness to the original spirit of Mother's Day.

For which, as we honor our own mothers, we should give thanks.