Grand Legacy

Guest Opinion: Mother's Day born under proud banner of pacifism

by Susan L. Feathers; Published in the Arizona Daily Star, 2 May, 2004.

The Mother's Day we celebrate Sunday is a far cry from the intended commemoration envisioned by its founder, Anna Marie Reeves Jarvis.

Jarvis launched the Mothers Day Work Clubs with her brother, a doctor, in the mid-1850s to teach people sanitation and hygiene to prevent disease.

When the Civil War broke out, the clubs' women refused to distinguish between Union or Confederate soldiers, ministering to wounded on both sides.

After the war, Jarvis established Mothers Friendship Day in communities where men had fought on both sides, to facilitate reconciliation and promote healing in community life.

Jarvis grew up listening to her mother advocate for peace and observing her leadership in church and community. Her mother wanted someone to establish a day to honor women's work in creating a healthy society.

When her mother passed away May 9, 1905, Jarvis began her campaign to establish a national day to recognize the important work of women as peacemakers and cultural leaders.

Uncompromising in her efforts, Jarvis spoke publicly, wrote letters and lobbied legislators. In 1910, she convinced the governor of West Virginia to proclaim a state Mother's Day.

In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law a resolution making the second Sunday in May the national observance of Mother's Day.

Jarvis's mother also had inspired Julia Ward Howe, the poet known for writing the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

When the Franco-Prussian war broke out in 1870, Howe was determined to establish an international mothers' peace day. Believing that war inflicted needless suffering, she wrote:

Arise then ... women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
... In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Howe failed to launch a mother's day for peace, but Jarvis succeeded 44 years later.

Jarvis chose a white carnation as the symbol of Mother's Day. Its botanical name means "divine flower."

For the rest of her life, Jarvis promoted Mother's Day as an observance of women's work for peace, justice and reconciliation.

But as the day became commercialized, Jarvis grew disheartened. Just before her death, she remarked that she wished she had never established it.

The Mother's Day she worked so hard to create had become a romanticized version, lacking its grand ideal to promote women's work for peace and equality among people and nations.

Folklore about the carnation has the flower's origin from the tears of Mary, as she watched her son drag the cross. His life was devoted to reconciliation.

Jarvis may not have known this when she chose Dianthus caryophyllus as the symbol of Mother's Day. But nothing could have been more perfect.

Susan L. Feathers is a Tucson writer who wrote this column in memory of her mother, Millie Feathers.