Long before Mother’s Day became a fixture of card aisles and brunch menus, Anna Jarvis was trying to build a holiday around grief, duty and gratitude. This Saturday, Taylor Schmalz will use the 19th Firstival at Historic St. George Museum and Archives to put Jarvis back at the center of the story, arguing that the woman behind the holiday wanted mothers to have an intimate day that celebrated them.
Schmalz, the director of collections and interpretations at Historic St. George, said Jarvis had a vision that has been blurred by the holiday’s later reputation. “People love the holiday, but they don’t remember her, or her vision,” Schmalz said. That vision began with Jarvis’ mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, who gave birth to 13 children in her home in Grafton, West Virginia, and saw only four of them live to adulthood. In the years before the Civil War, women in Grafton organized Mother’s Day Work Clubs to fight the diseases that took the lives of young children.
Jarvis moved to Philadelphia around 1904 with her brother Claude and joined what was then called the Old St. George’s Methodist Church. She worked in the advertising department at Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company. After her mother died on May 9, 1905, Jarvis began a letter-writing campaign to politicians and city officials calling for a day specifically for mothers, after her mother had asked her to memorialize the invisible work mothers do. She enlisted the support of John Wanamaker, James Elverson and Henry J. Heinz.
The first public celebration came on May 10, 1908, when Jarvis sent 500 carnations to her mother’s home church in West Virginia and stood before a group in the auditorium of the Wanamaker Building to thank mothers for all they do. The next day, an Inquirer article said many churches were decorated with white carnations, many homes across Philadelphia had great bunches of them in their windows, and there was a silent witness of unending grief in the snowy bunches in the cemeteries. It was a citywide moment, rooted in mourning and public praise, not marketing.
That history has often been overshadowed by the familiar story of Jarvis’ emotional spiral after she realized Mother’s Day was becoming more commercialized than Christmas. Schmalz wants to place her in a different light: as the creator of a holiday meant to be personal, not profitable. In Philadelphia, where the day began, that original intention still matters.
