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May
May
But this was absolutely not what Anna wanted.
When the price of carnations rocketed, she released a press release condemning florists:
“WHAT WILL YOU DO to rout charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations?”
By 1920, she was urging people not to buy flowers at all.
She was upset with any organisation that used her day for anything but her original, sentimental, design, says Antolini. This included charities that used the holiday for fund-raising, even if they meant to help poor mothers.
“It was a day meant to celebrate mothers, not pity them because they were poor,” explains Antolini.
“Plus some charities were not using the money for poor mothers like they claimed.”
Mother’s Day was even dragged into the debate over women’s votes.
Anti-suffragists said that a woman’s true place was in the home and that she was too busy as a wife and mother to be involved in politics.
For their part, suffrage groups would argue, “If she is good enough to be the mother of your children, she is good enough to vote.” And they stressed the need for women to have a say in the future well-being of their children.
The only one not to take advantage of Mother’s Day, it seems, was Anna herself.
She refused money offered to her by the florist industry.
“She never profited from the day and she could easily have done so. I admire her for that,” says Antolini.
Anna and her sister Lillian, who was visually impaired, survived on the inheritance from their father and their brother Claude, who ran a taxi business in Philadelphia before dying of a heart attack.
But Anna went on to spend every penny fighting the commercialisation of Mother’s Day.
Even before it became a national holiday she had claimed copyright on the phrase “Second Sunday in May, Mother’s Day”, and threatened to sue anyone who marketed it without permission.
“Sometimes groups or industries would purposely use the possessive plural spelling ‘Mothers’ Day’ in order to get around Anna’s copyright claims,” says Antolini. A Newsweek article written in 1944 claimed she had 33 pending lawsuits.
By then she was 80 and almost blind, deaf and destitute, and being cared for in a sanatorium in Philadelphia. There have long been claims that the floral and card industries secretly paid for Anna Jarvis’s care, but Antolini has never been able to verify this. “I would like to think that they did, but it just may be a good story and not true,” she says.
One of Anna’s final acts, while still living with her sister, was to go door-to-door in Philadelphia asking for signatures to back an appeal for Mother’s Day to be rescinded. Once she had been admitted to the sanatorium, Lillian soon died of carbon monoxide poisoning while trying to heat the run-down house. “Police claimed that icicles hung from the ceiling because it was so cold,” says Antolini. Anna herself died of heart failure in November 1948.
Short presentational grey line
Jane Unkefer, 86, another of Anna’s first cousins (and Elizabeth Burr’s aunt), thinks Anna Jarvis became obsessed with her anti-commercialisation crusade.
“I don’t think they were very wealthy, but she totally ran through whatever money she had,” she says.
“It’s embarrassing. I wouldn’t want people to think the family wasn’t caring for her, but she ended up in the equivalent of a pauper’s grave.”
They may not have been able to help her at the end of her life, but the family did honour Anna’s memory in another way – by not celebrating Mother’s Day for several generations.
“We really didn’t like Mother’s Day,” says Jane Unkefer. “And the reason we didn’t is that my mother, as a child, had heard a lot of negative things said about Mother’s Day. We acknowledged it as a nice sentiment, but we didn’t go in for the fancy dinner or the bouquets of flowers.”
As a young mother Jane used to stop in front of a plaque honouring Mother’s Day in Philadelphia and think about Anna. “It’s a sort of a poignant story because there’s so much love in it,” says Jane. “And I think what has come out of it is a nice thing. People do remember their mom, just the way she would have wanted them to.”
Jane confesses she has changed her mind about the celebration now. “Many generations later, I’ve forgotten all the negative things my mother ever said about it, and I get very angry if I don’t hear from my children. I want them to honour me and my day,” she says.
Jane’s younger sister, Emily d’Aulaire, has also found her attitude to Mother’s Day altering over time.
“I didn’t even really know about it until my own child was in school and came home with a Mother’s Day gift,” she says. “Our mother used to say something like, ‘Every day is Mother’s Day.'”
For a long time Emily was sad that Anna’s original intention for the day was thwarted, but these days she sends a card to her daughter-in-law, the mother of her grandchildren.
This year many families won’t be able to treat their mothers to flowers or a day out and instead will celebrate Mother’s Day via a video link, because of the lockdown.
But Antolini thinks Anna and her mother would have been pleased with such pared-down celebrations. She imagines that Mrs Jarvis, a veteran of many epidemics, would resurrect the Mother’s Day Clubs to help others. And Anna would be delighted with the lack of shopping opportunities, which she felt clouded the purity of her original vision.
Source: www.bbc.com/news/amp/stories-52589173
