By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

Six years after her successful campaign to create a national holiday honoring mothers, Anna Jarvis pursued a new goal that would consume the rest of her life—to abolish the holiday.

Anna Jarvis gave her fortune, her sanity, and her life to abolish the holiday that she had founded.

She had intended that the nation set aside a day for recognizing mothers’ sacrifices and for Americans to spend cherishing their own mothers. Instead it became little more than a new opportunity to profitably market commodities.

In one of her press releases, Ms. Jarvis wrote, “What will you do to rout charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations?”

Today the hijackers remain unrouted. The National Retail Federation reported that Americans would increase their Mother’s Day spending this year to about $21.2 billion dollars. Its president enthused, “We’re encouraged by the positive shift we’ve seen in spending on discretionary and gift items…boding well for retailers across all spectrums… .”

A sad history

In Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day, historian Katherine Antolini recounts that in the 1850s, Ann Reeve Jarvis—Anna Jarvis’s mother—organized mothers to improve sanitary conditions and lower infant mortality. During the Civil War, the groups that she began cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the conflict in her state of West Virginia.

Following the War they organized Mothers’ Friendship Day picnics to reunite and reconcile former combatants and their families. Julia Ward Howe, who had composed “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” joined the movement and in 1872 issued a Mother’s Day Proclamation calling for women to take an active political role in promoting peace. Eighteen cities celebrated it the following year, and Bostonians for nine more years.

After her mother’s death in 1905, Ann Jarvis began a national campaign to establish Mother’s Day as a national holiday, publishing articles, circulating petitions, and lobbying politicians. In 1914, Congress passed and President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation establishing Mother’s Day.

Ms. Jarvis, who enjoyed a substantial inheritance, could have become much wealthier by exploiting her historic role. Instead she became increasingly dismayed by the crass commercialization of what she saw as a sacred event. By the early 1920s she was writing that, “To have Mother’s Day the burdensome, wasteful, expensive gift day that Christmas and other special days have become, is not our pleasure.”

She organized boycotts, petitioned door-to-door to rescind the holiday, and at one time was prosecuting 33 simultaneous lawsuits. In 1923 she disrupted a Philadelphia confectioners convention. Two years later she crashed a convention of the American War Mothers, whom she believed were exploiting the holiday by hawking carnations. For her troubles, she was arrested.

She expended her fortune in these efforts, only to find it was no match for the profits that Mother’s Day generated for commercial concerns. In 1948, she died at 84 in a Philadelphia sanitarium, penniless and demented.

Mother’s Day: The marketing event

Mother’s Day is now one of the best opportunities for marketers to profitably sell products that have the virtue of being consumed and replaced each year. The U.S. National Restaurant Association reports that Mother’s Day is the year’s most popular holiday for dining out, producing $3.9 billion in sales.

Americans spend about $2.4 billion on Mother’s Day flowers and $1.5 billion on such personal services as spa days and facials. Those with deeper pockets spend $4.3 billion on jewelry.

After Christmas and Valentine’ Day, Mother’s Day is Hallmark Cards’ biggest sales opportunity. The company reports that 133 million Mother’s Day cards are exchanged annually. A thoughtful look at their sentiments reveals them as hackneyed clichés that don’t risk acquainting consumers with what truly honoring mothers might mean.

Honoring mothers

The average stay-at-home mother works 94 hours per week. If she were compensated at market rates, she would earn around $118,905 per year. The average working mother puts in 59.4 hours over and above the time that she spends in the workplace. At market rates, that represents an additional $70,107.

Truly honoring mom might involve closing the gender pay gap. For the last ten years women have been paid at a rate that is about 78% of the rate at which men are compensated.

Or it might mean public policies that deliver the kind of affordable childcare that is available to mothers in developed democracies. Or parental leave policies that parents in civilized countries take for granted.

Hijacking history

Following through to its logical conclusion what honoring motherhood really means would produce a withering indictment of our economic and political institutions. But those institutions’ genius is to hijack righteous motivations and transform them into consumerist rituals that reinforce the institutions and further enrich elites.

Consider another May holiday. Most of the developed world celebrates May Day as International Workers Day with parades led by trade unionists. Few Americans know that these foreigners are commemorating the 1886 Haymarket Massacre that occurred in the successful struggle by American workers for an eight-hour workday.

Fearing that that May Day celebrations might reinforce worker militancy, President Grover Cleveland created Labor Day. So now, on the first Monday in September American workers are encouraged to take the day off and roast wienies rather than recalling that weekends, paid vacations, sick leave, health and safety protections, and fair labor laws exist only because their ancestors risked and gave their lives to fight for them. Knowing history might encourage a hollowed-out middle class to challenge those who profit from America’s second age of oligarchy.

Or maybe not. I know that past columns that I’ve written regarding the history of Columbus Day and Christmas have evoked heated responses in our online blog. I will leave to the reader to speculate as to why.

It is a truism that history is written by the victors. Less often observed is that suppressing history is essential to the victors’ maintaining dominance. Understanding what ordinary people have achieved in the past might inspire ordinary people toward similar achievements in the present.

And ordinary Americans’ achievements, while little known, are extraordinary and extraordinarily inspiring. As Matt Damon advocated in Good Will Hunting, readers who are not intimidated by learning their forbearers’ accomplishments might give local historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States a read.

In his last great work T.S. Elliot wrote that, “A people without history is not redeemed from time.” Indeed, times are getting measurably harder for most, and they will continue to until Americans relearn the lessons of their own history.