The Founder of Mother’s Day Resented Its Commercialization

Colloquially, Mother’s Day is now known as a Hallmark Holiday

Birthplace of Anna Jarvis, from JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ MD on Wikipedia Commons

Everyone has pretty strong feelings about Mother’s Day these days. It’s a time to honor our mothers or pay homage to friends and family whose mothers were not in their lives, or whose mothers died too soon, or who didn’t exactly have the best relationships with their mothers. However, few know the history of Mother’s Day, that even though the founder of Mother’s Day helped make it a national holiday, she was openly against companies like Hallmark Cards commercializing the holiday.

Besides Christmas and Easter, Mother’s Day is perhaps the most commercialized holiday in America.

History

President Wilson’s Mother’s Day Proclamation of May 9, 1914 — NARA, Public Domain

Mother’s Day was founded by a woman named Anna Jarvis, who held a memorial for St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia. She started to give solid-white carnations in honor of her mother, who passed away. The point of Mother’s Day was the following, according to John Kaag and Skye C. Cleary at The Paris Review:

“For a single day, the life of a mother is supposed to be easy…