Mother’s Day and Father’s Day

Wikipedia says that in 1858, in the western Virginia towns of Grafton, Pruntytown, Philippi, Fetterman and Webster, Ann Reeves Jarvis started Mothers’ Day Work Clubs to improve health and sanitation. The clubs raised money for medicine, paid women to work in homes where the mother was ill, inspected milk, and taught families about hygiene. Wikipedia says she bore between eleven and thirteen children over seventeen years, and that only four lived to adulthood.

During the Civil War she urged the clubs to stay neutral and to help soldiers on both sides. In 1868 she held a “Mothers Friendship Day” for veterans of both sides and their families at the Taylor County Courthouse in Pruntytown. Her daughter Anna later recalled her praying, in a Sunday school lesson in 1876, that someone would one day found a memorial day for mothers.

Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the words of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, wrote an “Appeal to womanhood throughout the world”, later called the Mothers’ Day Proclamation, calling on women to oppose war. In 1872 she asked for a “Mothers’ Day for Peace” on 2 June. Wikipedia says the effort did not succeed, and that the modern Mother’s Day came 36 years later.

Wikipedia says that her day was “not for honouring mothers but for organizing pacifist mothers against war”.

Anna Jarvis, born in 1864 and the daughter of Ann Reeves Jarvis, organized a memorial for her mother, who died in May 1905. After a private service in 1907, the first public service was held on the morning of May 10, 1908, at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia. Wikipedia says Anna did not attend. She sent a telegram about the significance of the day and five hundred white carnations for those who did. That afternoon she spoke at the Wanamaker Store Auditorium in Philadelphia, where Wikipedia says 15,000 people attended.

Wikipedia says the Grafton church is now the International Mother’s Day Shrine.

Wikipedia says West Virginia, Jarvis’s home state, was the first to recognize the day, in 1910. In 1912 Jarvis incorporated the Mother’s Day International Association and trademarked the phrase “Second Sunday in May, Mother’s Day, Anna Jarvis, Founder”. She insisted that “Mother’s” be a singular possessive, for each family to honor its own mother.

Congress then acted. A joint resolution approved on May 8, 1914 designated the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day. The next day, May 9, 1914, President Wilson issued Proclamation 1268, which cites the resolution and asks that the flag be displayed on the second Sunday in May “as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country”.

History.com says Jarvis meant the day to be a personal occasion, a son or daughter honoring the mother they knew, and that it soon centered on printed cards, flowers, candy and other gifts. She campaigned against confectioners, florists and other retailers, launched numerous lawsuits against groups using the name, and eventually spent much of her sizable inheritance on legal fees. TODAY reports that in 1923 she threatened to sue the New York Mother’s Day Committee.

In 1925, when the American War Mothers sold carnations at their convention in Philadelphia, Jarvis went to the convention and was arrested for disturbing the peace; TODAY says the charges were dismissed. Wikipedia says she gathered signatures in 1943 for a petition to rescind the holiday. Wikipedia says she was by then infirm and was placed in the Marshall Square Sanitarium, and that she died on November 24, 1948.

Wikipedia says Mothering Sunday is “a day honouring mother churches”, kept in the United Kingdom, Ireland and some Commonwealth countries on the fourth Sunday of Lent. It falls on the day called Laetare Sunday. Medieval people made processions to their local “mother church”, usually the cathedral. The word “mothering” for going home on that day is recorded by 1644.

Constance Adelaide Smith revived it from 1913, to honor Mother Church, mothers of earthly homes, the Virgin Mary and Mother Nature. Wikipedia says it gained popularity in response to the American Mother’s Day, and that it is now often called “Mother’s Day” in the United Kingdom and has become a secular celebration of mothers.

On December 6, 1907 an explosion in the Monongah coal mines in West Virginia killed hundreds of miners. Wikipedia says that Grace Golden Clayton then suggested to her pastor, Rev. Robert T. Webb, that a service be held for the fathers who died. It was held on July 5, 1908, at Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Fairmont. Wikipedia says Clayton chose the date because it was the Sunday closest to her own father’s birthday. The UMC, Clio and West Virginia Archives pages tell the same story.

Wikipedia says the service was local and did not gain national attention. It cites two events around the same time: a July 4 celebration the day before that drew some 12,000 people to the city, and the death of a well-known daughter of church members. Wikipedia says no proclamation was made in the City Council, and the service was not repeated as a yearly day.

Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane heard a Mother’s Day sermon and thought of a similar day for fathers. Her father, William Jackson Smart, was a Civil War veteran and a widower who raised her and her five brothers. She proposed June 5, her father’s birthday. The Spokane ministers could not schedule that date and chose the third Sunday in June instead. The first observance was on June 19, 1910, with sermons in Presbyterian and Methodist churches. Boys from the YMCA wore roses, red for those with living fathers and white for those whose fathers had died. The Spokesman-Review says Washington’s governor, M. E. Hay, proclaimed the day for the whole state.

Dodd stopped promoting it in the 1920s. In the 1930s she took it up again, helped by national trade groups that gained from a gift-giving day: makers of ties and hats, tobacco shops and the like. In 1936 the New York Associated Men’s Wear Retailers formed a Father’s Day Committee.

The Spokesman-Review’s timeline lists other early efforts. In 1912 a Methodist church in Vancouver, Washington held a service and believed it was the first. In 1913 Representative J. Hampton Moore introduced a bill for a national Father’s Day. In 1915 Harry C. Meek of Lions International held a celebration on the third Sunday of June, his own birthday. In 1916 President Wilson used a telegraph key at the White House that unfurled a flag in Spokane. The Spokesman says Congress would not make it official, for fear of commercialization.

In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge, at Meek’s urging, recommended that Father’s Day be observed nationwide but declined to issue a national proclamation.

In 1957 Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked Congress to act, saying that “To single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable.” In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson issued Proclamation 3730 and approved Public Law 89-450, dated June 15, 1966, which designated the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day for 1966. The Library of Congress says the law was limited to that year.

On April 24, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed House Joint Resolution 687, which became Public Law 92-278 and made Father’s Day a permanent national observance on the third Sunday in June.

The New Yorker reported in 1937 that in 1923 a New York man named Robert Spero, a retired importer known to children as “Uncle Robert”, proposed a Parents Day in place of Mother’s Day, because honoring only one parent was lopsided. It says he gained letters of support from city and state officials, held a public demonstration in 1927, and set up Parents Day in competition with Mother’s Day by celebrating it on the same date every year after. The 1937 gathering, on the Mall in Central Park, was addressed by the mayor and by school officials, and it used the motto “A Kiss for Mother, A Hug for Dad”. President Hoover sent a message for the May 8, 1932 celebration.

The official United States Parents’ Day is a separate observance, created in 1994 for the fourth Sunday in July. South Korea’s Parents’ Day, on May 8, was set in 1973 and replaced the day that had been Mother’s Day there.

The claim is made in print. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Awake! quotes the 1959 Encyclopaedia Britannica: “A festival derived from the custom of mother worship in ancient Greece. Formal mother worship, with ceremonies to Cybele, or Rhea, the Great Mother of the Gods, were performed on the Ides of March throughout Asia Minor.” Against it, Wikipedia says that Mother’s Day “is not directly related” to the traditional celebrations of motherhood from antiquity, naming the Greek worshippers of Cybele, the mother deity Rhea, the Roman festival of Hilaria and Mothering Sunday.

The same Awake! article quotes the New York Times of May 10, 1953, which says that despite the popularity of Cybele and sporadic honors for mothers in the Middle Ages, it was in 1914 that the United States Congress designated the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

Mothering Sunday is real and older, and it now goes by the name “Mother’s Day” in the United Kingdom. But Wikipedia says that it began as a day honoring mother churches, on the fourth Sunday of Lent, and that it was revived in 1913 by Constance Adelaide Smith and gained popularity in response to the American holiday.

Howe wrote the “Appeal to womanhood throughout the world” and in 1872 asked for a “Mothers’ Day for Peace” on 2 June. Wikipedia says that it did not succeed, and that the modern Mother’s Day was established by Anna Jarvis 36 years later.

Wikipedia says the first public service was held that morning at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, and the West Virginia Archives’ Goldenseal article gives the same account.

Wikipedia says Wilson “signed a proclamation” in 1914 designating the second Sunday in May. The documents show two dates: a joint resolution approved May 8, 1914 (38 Stat. 770), and Proclamation 1268 of May 9, 1914, which cites it.

History.com says she launched numerous lawsuits and eventually spent much of her sizable inheritance on legal fees. The West Virginia Archives’ Goldenseal article says her campaign was funded from money inherited from her parents and then from her brother Claude.

History.com reports that in 1925, at the convention of the American War Mothers in Philadelphia, where carnations were being sold to raise funds, she was arrested for disturbing the peace. TODAY reports the same event and says the charges were dismissed.

Wikipedia’s opening paragraph says that “a legend exists” that the floral industry paid her bills, and its text later says that people connected with the floral and greeting card industries paid the bills at the sanitarium. We found no source that gives a document, an amount or a name.

IslamQA’s article repeats the common telling that carnations were one of her mother’s favorite flowers. In her own words, quoted on Wikipedia, Jarvis said that the white carnation’s “whiteness is to symbolize the truth, purity and broad-charity of mother love” and that when she chose it she was remembering “my mother’s bed of white pinks”.

The convention is real and common today. Wikipedia says that by the 1920s the floral industry, which was raising the price of white carnations, introduced red ones, and that the red for living mothers and white for the dead was a later re-use of her symbol. In Spokane in 1910, boys wore red roses for living fathers and white ones for fathers who had died (step 8).

Rav Avigdor Miller said of Mother’s Day: “It was nothing but a ploy of the businessmen,” and “A President didn’t think it up. It didn’t begin as an act of Congress.” The commercial side is documented: Hallmark and other companies were selling Mother’s Day cards by the early 1920s, and trade groups for ties, hats and tobacco took up Father’s Day in the 1930s (steps 5 and 8).

The service of July 5, 1908 is documented (step 7), and Wikipedia says it is “believed to be the first recorded occasion celebrating Father’s Day”.

The numbers differ by source. Wikipedia’s article on Clayton and the Associated Press say 361 killed, and Clayton’s article says 250 were fathers. Wikipedia’s article on the disaster says 362, with 216 women widowed and 475 children left behind, with more born later. The Clio and the AP say more than a thousand children. The Appalachian Historian says that the state’s count was 361, that the federal count was 362, that contemporary newspapers put the figure at more than 400, and that the real number was probably higher.

Her father was a Methodist minister, Fletcher Golden. The AP’s account speaks of the birthday of her “late father”, and Wikipedia says she chose the Sunday nearest his birthday. The Monongah victims were miners, and none of the sources we read says her father was one of them.

The Clio page says the mine disaster “claimed the life of her husband”. Wikipedia’s article on Clayton and the AP do not say so. The UMC says she lived with her husband and children when the disaster struck nearby, and does not say he died, and an attendee’s 1962 letter calls her “Mrs. Charles Clayton” and does not say she was a widow.

The Spokesman-Review says her mother died in childbirth with the fifth brother. Wikipedia says that when Sonora was 16 her mother, Ellen Victoria Cheek Smart, died in childbirth with her sixth child, and that Sonora was the only daughter. Her father, William Jackson Smart, was a Civil War veteran. That makes six children, Sonora and five brothers.

The Spokesman-Review dates the sermon that gave her the idea to May 9, 1909. The House history page says that in the spring of 1910 she presented a petition to local ministers. Both give June 19, 1910 for the first observance.

The Spokesman-Review says he honored the Spokane celebration by using a telegraph key on his White House desk that unfurled a flag in Spokane. He did not make the trip.

The Spokesman-Review says that in 1916 Congress resisted for that reason, “which was already happening with Mother’s Day”. Wikipedia’s article on Mother’s Day adds that in 1908 Congress rejected a proposal for Mother’s Day, joking that it would also have to proclaim a “Mother-in-law’s Day”.

The Spokesman-Review says that in 1924 President Coolidge, acting at Meek’s urging, recommended that Father’s Day be observed nationwide but declined to make it a national proclamation.

The Spokesman-Review says Johnson issued “an executive order” and Hallmark Ideas says he signed one. The Library of Congress says that in 1966 Johnson issued Proclamation 3730 under Public Law 89-450, and that the law set the third Sunday in June for that year only.

The Library of Congress says House Joint Resolution 687 became Public Law 92-278 on April 24, 1972, and made the third Sunday in June permanent. Wikipedia says Nixon signed a bill making it a national observance in 1972. The Spokesman-Review lists a “Joint Resolution 187”, which does not match the Library of Congress number.

Hallmark’s Father’s Day page says that a Babylonian youth named Elmesu carved the first known Father’s Day card in clay nearly 4,000 years ago, and that his message wished his father good health and a long life.

The New Yorker, writing in 1937, says that Robert Spero, a children’s radio entertainer, proposed Parents Day in 1923 in place of Mother’s Day, and that every year since he held it on Mother’s Day to compete with it. It spells his name “Spero”, and the article shows it was still running that year.

Its beginnings were in church: Wikipedia says Jarvis started it as a liturgical service, at a Methodist church in 1908. The first Father’s Day services were in Methodist and Presbyterian churches too (steps 7 and 8). Wikipedia also says that the day is now a secular observance in many countries, kept with cards, flowers and gifts.