In Honor of a Particular Motherhood

This paper aims to examine Mother’s Day and Anna Jarvis, the holiday’s founder in the U.S., her attempts to defend the supposed integrity of the holiday, and ironies concerning her conception and protection of the maternal holiday. Jarvis first celebrated Mother’s Day in 1908 as a holy occasion to honor her late mother and all mothers for their devotion to the home and family, and it became an official holiday in 1914. Yet, floral and other commercial industries soon recognized the economic value of the maternal holiday and came to turn it into a commercial bonanza. In addition, other individuals and organizations came to appropriate it, investing it with diverse meanings and interpretations according to their respective agendas. As Jarvis insisted on her vision of Mother’s Day, she perceived them as a threat to the holiday’s purity and integrity. As a result, she vehemently opposed their embrace of the holiday, exposing their pretense and underlying self-interests. Yet, while she was quick to spot others’ foibles, she never acknowledged her own problem. Jarvis disregarded her mother’s social and political activism to fit into her design of Mother’s Day, i.e., a private celebration of mothers’ domestic roles. This selective focus on her mother’s life and legacies reveals Jarvis’ failings as well as a particular cultural construction of motherhood she memorialized through Mother’s Day. At the same time, her glorification and reaffirmation of traditional gender roles came to serve conservatives who were against the growing women’s roles outside the home. This was ironic, not the least because her energetic campaign for Mother’s Day was largely possible because she was free from the motherly care and domestic duties.