The West Virginian Who Created Mother’s Day And Regretted It

Anna Jarvis grew up in Grafton, West Virginia in the late 1800s. She was one of 11 children but one of just four of the children who lived to adulthood. As the oldest daughter, she shared a close bond with her mother. Anna often wrote her mother letters and took care of her as she developed heart conditions. She died in 1905.

Her mother’s death led Jarvis to devote her life to the holiday now recognized as International Mother’s Day.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Duncan Slade spoke with Katharine Antolini, a history and gender studies professor at West Virginia Wesleyan University and the author of Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Slade: What impact does her death have on Anna Jarvis? How does it go from the death of just her mother to this holiday? How does that happen?

Katharine Antolini: When going through her writing and what she would claim is that it all begins in the 1870s. Anna is 12 years old. They’re in church at the Andrew Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton. And her mother, Mrs. Jarvis, is a Sunday school teacher. And so she was listening to her mother give a Sunday school lesson on mothers of the Bible. You know, it was her mother’s favorite Sunday school lesson. So at the end of that Sunday school lesson, her mother gives this prayer that she hopes and prays that someday somebody will create a memorial on Mother’s Day to honor women. So Anna swears she remembers that.

Slade: What is the first Mother’s Day and how does it progress?

Antolini: Mrs. Jarvis dies in 1905. So 1906 to 1907, all that Anna organizes are small little memorials in Grafton at what is now the International Mother’s Day Shrine. And then, she decides she wants not just little memorial services to her mother, she wants this Mother’s Day. So she starts this huge letter-writing campaign in 1907. And she’s writing to anybody she thinks that can help her. She’s writing to politicians, she’s writing to merchants, she’s writing to church organizations. And she lucks out because she finds a supporter, and John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, a huge merchant.

International Mother's Day Shrine
Inside the church where the first Mother’s Day ceremony was held.

On May 10, 1908, is the first official Mother’s Day when the first ceremony is held in Grafton. So that’s why West Virginia we claim to be the ‘mother state of Mother’s Day,’ because we hosted it in Grafton in the morning. So by 1909, it’s spreading to other states. By 1912, Mother’s Day is being celebrated in every state in some capacity. So by the time we get to 1914, and Woodrow Wilson makes it a national holiday, it’s already being celebrated by every state. So, Congress and Woodrow Wilson are kind of making official a holiday that is already being celebrated on the state level for a couple of years by then.

Slade: From the first Mother’s Day to a national holiday in like, what seven years? It seems like such a feat with basically just these letters that are going out and one woman’s energy. What is her pitch in those letters?

Antolini: Well, it depends on who she’s writing to. She would tailor her argument to the audience that she’s writing to. For example, one of my favorite letters, she’s writing to Theodore Roosevelt. And Theodore Roosevelt, if you remember, his big thing, especially in the early 20th century, was every man needs to fight for his country. And for a woman to serve her country, she needs to have children. So, Teddy Roosevelt equated motherhood to patriotism. So obviously, then when Anna’s writing to him, saying you need to support this holiday, because we need to honor these women who are patriots, these women who are having children right for America, and are serving their country just like men who go to war, but women are serving their country by being mothers.

Slade: I was thinking about how nowadays Mother’s Day is this big thing where there’s candy, you go to brunch afterwards, there’s flowers involved. There’s all this other stuff. When does that commercialization start? And then how does she deal with that?

Antolini: Alright, so by 1912, she’s already mad at the floral industry. So it starts pretty quickly, because once the holiday starts to spread — by 1912 it’s been recognized throughout the United States — of course, the floral industry is gonna jump on that. And so by then she’s mad. She’s mad because they’re actually kind of claiming that was their day. The floral industry would have advertisements saying “this is our day.” By 1922, she’s leading boycotts for the floral industry. In 1923, there was a confectioner’s convention in Philadelphia and she crashes that convention to yell at them. In 1925, she’s arrested for disorderly conduct for crashing another convention of charities who are trying to use the day, so yeah. She’s pretty passionate about her day.

Slade: Over a century since it started, what is her legacy? Is it the person that started this holiday? Is it the person who opposed this commercialization that got out of control? Where is her mark on the world now?

Antolini: Well, the fact that we still celebrate the holiday, and there aren’t that many holidays that celebrate just women. I mean, I think if you Google it, there’s seven honest holidays. I mean, there’s like 14, if you count like National “Don’t wear a Bra” Day and silly, stupid things like that. But there’s only like seven holidays that celebrate women. Mother’s Day is the most popular holiday that celebrates women. So she would be happy that the holiday is still the most popular, you know, holiday that celebrates women, but she would be upset that nobody knows who she is. Because her ego is so wrapped up into it because she dedicates the rest of her 40 years — 40 years of her life is dedicated to this movement. And even long after the holiday was established in 1914. She’s defending it for the rest of her life.

She never backs down from anybody, right? I’m not talking just the floral industry and the greeting card industry. She went toe to toe with the Roosevelts and New York City businessmen and people who had more power than her and more influence than her. She didn’t care. They were whoever she was fighting against. Whether it’s the president or the florist down the street. They were using her day in a way that she didn’t agree with and she was gonna tell you all about it.

The Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton, W.Va., is a national landmark, recognized as the International Mother’s Day Shrine.

On May 11, 2008, Lucy Kaplansky and the Mountain Stage band commemorated the holiday with a tribute to all mothers in the same church where the holiday began 100 years ago.

Improving Maternal Mental Health – Women Say They Need More Support

Depression and anxiety both during pregnancy and afterwards are common, affecting 4 to 17 percent of all mothers, according to a 2015 study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

“I have struggled with anxiety and depression for as long as I can remember, even as a child I struggled with that sort of thing,” said Jennifer Petrosky, a therapist who has two young children. “And what I have learned about maternal health as a therapist and just being a mom is it’s just not discussed until after the baby is born.”

Even then, she said, her doctor just asked her if she was suicidal – she wasn’t – and left it at that. She was able to cope until she got pregnant again.

“When I got pregnant with my daughter, my dad had passed away about two months before that, we’d had a miscarriage, my husband had chronic fatigue and couldn’t get out of bed most of the winter.  I know stress played a big role, but everyday I just cried in the shower because I was so anxious and so depressed and I was like ‘there’s no village around me to help.’”

“The way that we live, the trends in our current society, definitely compound or magnify the experience of postpartum depression,” said Michelle Comer, the West Virginia support coordinator for Postpartum Support International and a therapist specializing in maternal mental health. “It isn’t new – it’s been around since moms have been having babies.”

Comer said a big help to moms who are feeling anxious, depressed and alone is connecting with others in the same boat.

“We were never intended to parent in isolation,” she said.

And yet many women find themselves asked to be supermom – to be everything for everyone and to do it by themselves.

“And a lot of people say, ‘Oh, I live around a lot of people,’ or ‘I go to church and they’re really nice.’ But that’s not people living with you,” said Danielle Bergum. Bergum has a 9-year-old and a 5-year-old. When she got pregnant the first time, it wasn’t planned and she didn’t want to be pregnant. The rolling emotions led to severe prenatal depression and a lingering sense of isolation.

“Historical, tribal culture – the only thing that they were doing was survival. They had help just with basic survival needs,” said Bergum. “And we’re expected to not only do our basic survival stuff on our own, we’re expected to do everything we put on top of that on our own, just to function in this culture that we’ve created. So part of it is this perspective about what being successful is and what you’re supposed to do as a mom, as a dad.”

Bergum ended up becoming a doula (a birth support person) and a birth educator. She focused on her nutrition and overhauled her lifestyle so that she felt balanced again. For her, this meant finding a job she could do from home and homeschooling her kids. It was a long process.

For others like Sarah Dusenbery, though, feeling “normal” again may involve medication.

“After I had my second child five years later, it was just like the same thing repeated itself. And that’s when I kind of realized something was wrong, but I was too ashamed because it’s not talked about enough,” said Dusenbery.

Dusenbery didn’t get help until after the birth of her third child, despite the fact that feelings of anxiety and depression lingered for months, then years, after each birth. Now that she’s on medication for her anxiety and depression, she said she feels like a new person.

For all three women, and probably for many of the moms in your life, a recurring theme is the need for support and the desire for a return to some kind of village where the burdens, and joys, of raising children, can be shared.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Marshall Health, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

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