Why Did Mother’s Day’s Founder Try to Abolish It? Origins and Korea’s Parents’ Day

The woman who created Mother’s Day spent the last years of her life trying to abolish it. In 1908 Anna Jarvis organized the first Mother’s Day observances and gave the world the holiday we know today, but when florists, candy shops, and greeting card companies turned it into a “day for buying gifts,” she fought back with boycotts, lawsuits, and protests. Most of her inheritance went into that fight, and in 1948 she died, virtually penniless, in a sanitarium. There is a stranger twist as well. In the 1920s and 1930s, one of the movements she fought hardest as a threat to Mother’s Day was a campaign for “Parents’ Day,” a day to honor mothers and fathers together. Nearly half a century later, Korea’s May 8 changed its name from Mother’s Day to Parents’ Day. Here is the story of two countries hidden behind a single carnation pinned to a parent’s chest.

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A Day That Began With a Mother’s Prayer

The May Mother’s Day observed in many countries today is not an ancient festival but a holiday created in the United States in the early twentieth century. At its starting point was a mother’s prayer. Anna Jarvis recalled hearing her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, pray when Anna was a girl: “I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mothers day commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life. She is entitled to it.” (Britannica, Smithsonian)

Ann Reeves Jarvis was herself an activist who cared for her community. In the Appalachian hills, where disease was so common that only four of her thirteen children survived to adulthood, she organized Mothers’ Day Work Clubs beginning in 1858 that provided medicine to families and inspected milk and sanitation. During the Civil War the clubs cared for sick soldiers from both the Union and the Confederacy, and in 1868, after the war, she organized a Mothers’ Friendship Day to bring families from both sides back together. (National Park Service, History.com)

Ann Reeves Jarvis died on May 9, 1905. Anna vowed to fulfill her mother’s prayer, and two years later she began writing to politicians, business owners, ministers, and journalists. The first official Mother’s Day observances took place on May 10, 1908, in two places at once: Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where her mother had worshipped, and the Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, where Anna lived. Anna herself did not attend the Grafton service. She spoke at the Philadelphia event and sent 500 white carnations to the Grafton church for those who attended. (National Park Service, National Geographic)

The date and the symbol both came from her mother. The second Sunday in May marked the anniversary of her mother’s death, and the white carnation was her mother’s favorite flower. Anna was particular about spelling, too. It was to be the singular possessive “Mother’s Day,” not the plural “Mothers’ Day.” The day was not meant to honor all the world’s mothers at once but to be a “personal day,” when each son and daughter would visit or write to one mother of their own. (Britannica, Smithsonian)

How It Became a National Observance

Anna Jarvis wrote every year to every state governor and asked for help from influential figures such as former President Theodore Roosevelt and the writer Mark Twain. In 1910 West Virginia became the first state to designate Mother’s Day by law, and other states followed. (Smithsonian, Library of Congress)

Federal recognition came in 1914. On May 8, Congress approved a joint resolution “designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day,” and the next day, May 9, President Woodrow Wilson signed Proclamation 1268. The proclamation did not create a day off work. It asked government officials to display the flag on all government buildings and the people to display it at their homes “as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.” Wilson, in other words, proclaimed Mother’s Day; he did not create it. (The American Presidency Project, Library of Congress)

The Founder Who Fought the “Day for Buying Gifts”

The holiday succeeded too quickly and too well. The symbols and customs Anna had chosen soon became material for advertising. Her call to write letters to mothers fed the greeting card industry, and the white carnation fed the floral industry. Anna regarded the day as the property of the movement she had founded. In 1912 she incorporated the Mother’s Day International Association, and she filed lawsuit after lawsuit against groups and businesses that used the name without her approval. (Britannica, Smithsonian, History.com)

In 1922 she endorsed a boycott of florists who raised the price of white carnations every May, and the following year she crashed a convention of retail confectioners to protest. In 1925 she interrupted the national convention of the American War Mothers in Philadelphia, which was raising money by selling carnations, and was arrested for disturbing the peace. In one statement she denounced the commercial interests as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest, and truest movements and celebrations.” (Smithsonian, History.com, National Park Service)

In 1934 a commemorative Mother’s Day stamp appeared, based on a design sketched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. It reproduced Whistler’s famous portrait of his own mother, but Anna disliked the design and made clear that the words “Mother’s Day” must not appear on the stamp. The stamp that was issued instead carried the line “In memory and in honor of the mothers of America.” (National Geographic)

The fight eventually wore her life down. She spent most of her inheritance on legal fees, and in 1943 she prepared a petition to abolish Mother’s Day altogether, but she was placed in a sanitarium before the campaign could begin. Childless, she died in a sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on November 24, 1948, at the age of 84. (Britannica, History.com)

The Other Holiday the Founder Fought: Parents’ Day

The rival Anna Jarvis considered most threatening was not a florist but another holiday. In 1924 the New York philanthropist Robert Spero held a “Parents’ Day” celebration on the second Sunday in May to honor mothers and fathers together. His aim was to remind fathers that they shared responsibility for the home, and in 1926 a crowd of 4,000 attended a Parents’ Day rally in the Bronx. In 1930 New York Assemblyman Julius Berg even introduced a bill to replace Mother’s Day with Parents’ Day on the state calendar. (Smithsonian)

Anna objected vehemently. She called the measure an “anti-mother bill sponsored by a little clique of anti-mother sons.” “One day out of all the ages, and one day out of all the year to bear the name ‘mother’ is surely not too much for her,” she argued. Berg’s bill failed repeatedly, and the Parents’ Day movement faded in the 1940s. Instead, Father’s Day grew as a separate day to honor fathers. In the end, the United States kept Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as two separate days. (Smithsonian)

The “Mother’s Days” Before Mother’s Day

There were earlier attempts before Anna Jarvis’s Mother’s Day. The best known came from Julia Ward Howe, the poet and activist who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Moved by the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, she issued her Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, an appeal for women of all nations to gather to prevent war and discuss peace. From 1872 she called for a Mothers’ Peace Day every June 2, and gatherings on that day continued until about 1913 in cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. But they gradually faded, and as the world entered the First World War, the mothers’ pleas for peace fell quiet as well. (National Geographic, History.com)

The two movements were connected. National Geographic reports that Ann Reeves Jarvis attended Howe’s gatherings. Their character, however, was different. Where the days of Howe and Ann Reeves Jarvis called mothers to act for their communities, her daughter Anna’s day was a personal one on which children thanked their own mothers. Historian Katharine Antolini concludes that it was Anna’s sentimental and private vision of Mother’s Day that ultimately prevailed. (National Geographic, History.com)

Different Days, Different Roots Around the World

The wish to honor mothers is found everywhere. The dates and origins differ from country to country, yet the fact that the urge to honor those who gave us life appears across cultures and religions suggests, like the ancient teaching to “honor your father and your mother,” that this regard was planted in human beings from the start.

Britain’s Mothering Sunday has different roots from the American Mother’s Day. In the Middle Ages a custom developed in which people who had moved away visited their home parish church and their mothers on Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, and this became Mothering Sunday in Britain. That is why its date still moves between March and April each year. As the tradition faded, Constance Smith, a vicar’s daughter in Nottinghamshire, began a campaign in 1913 to revive Mothering Sunday, worried that a secular Mother’s Day imported from America would push aside the older tradition rooted in the church calendar. (Britannica, Christian Today)

The variety of dates is striking as well. Many countries, including the United States, observe the second Sunday in May, but several Arab countries such as Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen mark Mother’s Day on March 21, Thailand on August 12, Argentina on the third Sunday in October, and Russia on the last Sunday in November. Russia’s Mother’s Day was set by presidential decree in 1998; before that, in the Soviet Union, International Women’s Day on March 8 also served as the day for honoring mothers. (Britannica, Izvestia)

Korea’s May 8: From Mother’s Day to Parents’ Day

Korea’s May 8 did not start out as a day for “parents” either. According to the National Archives of Korea, the State Council designated May 8 as Mother’s Day in 1955, and the first Mother’s Day was observed the following year, on May 8, 1956. Several organizations were already holding Mother’s Day events, and the State Council’s decision turned it into a national observance. The government’s stated reason was that “a mother’s love for her children is absolute, transcending all desire,” and that “the love and spirit of sacrifice of Korean mothers in particular are worthy of being proudly shown to the whole world.” (National Archives of Korea)

The Korean War had ended only a few years earlier. Mother’s Day in the 1950s included ceremonies honoring model mothers, and among those recognized were war widows who supported their parents-in-law and excelled in raising their children, mothers who had sent three or more sons to war, and mothers who had given birth to ten or more children. Korea’s Mother’s Day was also a way for the nation to comfort mothers who had endured the war. (National Archives of Korea)

The name “Parents’ Day” (Eobeoinal) appeared in 1973. On March 30 of that year, the Regulations on Various Commemorative Days were enacted as Presidential Decree No. 6615, and Mother’s Day became Parents’ Day. According to the National Archives of Korea, the aim was to “preserve the spirit of Mother’s Day while elevating it into a day of gratitude toward ancestors and all parents,” making it a day of thanks and respect for ancestors, parents, and elders. Another factor was that, while Mother’s Day was being observed, people had begun to say there should also be a day for fathers. The National Archives of Korea explains that the change was linked to the 1970s emphasis on “loyalty and filial piety education” and that it began to stress children’s duties to their parents more than mothers’ responsibilities. (National Archives of Korea, National Law Information Center, Encyclopedia of Korean Culture)

Today the Regulations on Various Commemorative Days assign Parents’ Day to the Ministry of Health and Welfare as a day for events “honoring the kindness of ancestors and parents and promoting the care of elders and older people.” The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture explains that on this day children pin carnations on their parents and grandparents at home, while official ceremonies honor people for their devotion to their parents. The carnation that an American daughter chose because it was her mother’s favorite flower became, across the ocean in Korea, the flower pinned to the chests of parents and grandparents. (National Law Information Center, Encyclopedia of Korean Culture)

In this way “Parents’ Day,” the very name Anna Jarvis resisted in America, became the name of May 8 in Korea. That does not mean either country chose wrongly. The United States chose to honor mothers and fathers on separate days, while Korea chose to honor parents and elders together within its tradition of filial piety and respect for the old. What Anna Jarvis tried to protect to the end, however, was not a name but the heart behind the day. The Mother’s Day she wanted was remembered not by expensive gifts but by a letter a child wrote by hand and by the steps taken to visit in person. Knowing where a holiday came from is also a way of returning that heart to where it first belonged.

References

• Proclamation 1268—Mother’s Day, 1914 — The American Presidency Project (UCSB)
• Anna Maria Jarvis — U.S. National Park Service
• Mother’s Day: Topics in Chronicling America — Library of Congress
• Mother’s Day — Encyclopædia Britannica
• Anna Jarvis — Encyclopædia Britannica
• The Tenacious Woman Who Helped Keep Mother’s Day Alive — Smithsonian Magazine
• How Mother’s Day became its founder’s worst nightmare — National Geographic
• Why the Founder of Mother’s Day Turned Against It — History.com
• Mother’s Day Began as a Peace Movement — History.com
• The little-known story of the woman who rescued Mothering Sunday — Christian Today
• The true story of Mother’s Day: how the holiday appeared in Russia — Izvestia
• Record of the Month: The establishment of Parents’ Day on May 8 — National Archives of Korea (in Korean)
• Regulations on Various Commemorative Days — National Law Information Center (in Korean)
• Eobeoinal (Parents’ Day) — Encyclopedia of Korean Culture (in Korean)

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