She volunteered to archive them and spent months poring over the records. In the church’s kitchen area, Antolini said, she found several boxes of documents that belonged to Jarvis. It’s a museum of the original church where the first Mother’s Day service was held. She would probably be equally angered to know that the holiday is celebrated in part through Mother’s Day specials and sales, Hallmark cards and floral arrangements.Īntolini, chair of the history department at West Virginia Wesleyan College, said she began studying Jarvis and the history of Mother’s Day in the 1990s, when she visited the International Mother’s Day Shrine, in Grafton, West Virginia. “But she’d be upset that people don’t remember her,” the historian said. If she were alive today, Antolini said, Jarvis would’ve been thrilled that Mother’s Day remains popular. She died in a sanitarium at age 84 – alone, blind and penniless. The fight that consumed Jarvis was waged in vain, and her campaign drained the modest fortune she’d inherited from her family. “It became a part of her identity,” the historian said. Her letters were signed, “Anna Jarvis, Founder of Mother’s Day.”
She even claimed legal copyright to the holiday, Antolini said. She started fights, threatened lawsuits, wrote letters to politicians, issued bitter news releases, organized protests, fought with Eleanor Roosevelt, demanded an audience with sitting presidents, among other actions. So when people co-opted her idea for other purposes, Jarvis was incensed. To her, it was simply a day to honor mothers, and she started it to commemorate her own. Jarvis spent decades fighting an uphill battle to keep Mother’s Day from becoming the commercialized holiday that it is today. The incident was recounted in a newspaper article published sometime in the early 1900s, years after Jarvis organized the first Mother’s Day service in the country, said Katharine Antolini, a historian who has studied Jarvis and how Mother’s Day became a national holiday. The woman who invented Mother’s Day would absolutely hate what it is today – The Denver Post
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