Hi Miriam,
My grandmother Jarvis swore that Anna Jarvis is my great great great
Aunt. I'm not finding the link, but Anna's parents did move to the
Grafton, West Virginia area, where they raised their family. The area
already had a large number of Jarvis's. John Jarvis, my several times
over great grandfather, was born around 1756 in what then was the
Virginia Colony, but I have never found the family connection with the
Anna Jarvis family.
Anna was named after her mother, Anna Jarvis. She never married, so
if she is a great great great aunt, it must be through a brother.
Although my Grandmother Jarvis was no blood relation, she was very
proud to claim Anna as "family". Grandma Jarvis was born in Web City,
Missouri in March of 1874, and died in September of 1960. As a boy, I
questioned Grandma Jarvis about life back in "the olden days". She
was more than happy to sit with her little grandson and spin many
tales. Her sister and brother-in-law also lived for some years in
Seattle, and Aunt Ollie told me many of the same stories.
I think I've mentioned before that I have a more certain family link
from my Grandmother Jarvis, born to Tom and Sarah Hickman, through
Sarah, born Sarah Davis, daughter of an older brother of Jefferson
Davis. While my dad accepted Anna Jarvis as a family member, he never
claimed Jefferson Davis.
Grandma Jarvis was raised on a small plantation near Webb City.
Before the Civil War, her father owned 4 slaves. He was not a wealthy
plantationer, and worked alongside his slaves. After Lincoln declared
the slaves emancipated, Great Great Grandpa Hickman told his four
slaves that they could continue to live on his land, paying with their
labor for their huts and food, or they were free to go. Free to go?
Where? So they stayed, living about the same as they had lived under
slavery.
Grandmother Jarvis was raised by a Nanny, who also served as a "wet
nurse" when Grandma was a baby. Like so many Southern white children,
Grandma played with the slave children along with the children of
white neighbors. Grandma told me many times, that she did not have a
prejudiced bone in her body...as long as they,(the Colored) stayed in
their place. I never could get Grandma to explain just where "Their
Place" was. Grandma Jarvis was an Abraham Lincoln Republican...her
words, and a Presbyterian of the Bible Belt sort. Whenever my dad did
anything she believed to be "Unchristian" she would lecture him,
reading long passages from the Bible and throwing stove wood at him if
he dared to look away. Dad always said his mother "led him away from
the Church", as well as turning him into a Radical.
Grandmother Jarvis lived her last years in the Yesler Project, a low
income housing development in Seattle. She spoke out against FDR and
Governor Rossellini, our Democratic Governor, responsible for
establishing the state's old age pension.
So, like all of us, she lived with no regard concerning her many
contradictions.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/10/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
Is the Anna Jarvis whom she mentions, related to you?
Miriam
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American
<heathercoxrichardson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2020 12:21 AM
To: miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: May 9, 2020
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that
Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother.
But
“Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the
plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death
caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American
women
that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted
such
carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to
their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern
society.
May 9, 2020
<http://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxtkEGOwyAMRU8TlhEhUNIFi9n0GhEBt7GGAAKnbW4
_dLIaaSTLtqwv2-87S_BI5TA5VWJ7hTKjNxd15fzKvJF-mNTEsM73ArBZDIbKDizvS0BnCVP86AV
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32uJrin3dl0rWffcubU2TIeUArZGTVkpfGLY3BOdq4Fy2OvVDLxtPGKqur3cn-fYQf5awYjYsaLd
newebIGVKMWCEPgJ9GOem2vaIdMwQ7RLAn_h02vVLQ0cGE-FVAxBBOYfNEykv41WzdtCnZlw0_0H
9AExxhJ0> Heather Cox Richardson
May 10
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that
Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother.
But
“Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the
plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death
caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American
women
that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted
such
carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to
their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern
society.
The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in the
modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of heroism
discovered that long-range weapons turned death into tortured anonymity.
Men
were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, or
transformed into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives
away.
The women who had watched their men march off to war were haunted by its
results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons. The men who did come home were
scarred in body and mind.
Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.
But out of the war also came a new sense of empowerment. Women had bought
bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed farms,
harvested
fields, worked in war industries, reared children, and nursed soldiers.
When
the war ended, they had every intention of continuing to participate in
national affairs. But the Fourteenth Amendment, which established that
African American men were citizens, did not include women. In 1869, women
organized the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and the
American Woman’s Suffrage Association to promote women’s right to have a
say
in American government.
From her home in Boston, Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the American
Woman’s Suffrage Association. She was an enormously talented writer, who
had
penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic in the early years of the Civil War,
a hymn whose lyrics made it a point to note that Christ was “born of
woman.”
Howe was drawn to women’s rights because the laws of her time meant that
her
children belonged to her abusive husband. If she broke free of him, she
would lose any right to see her children, a fact he threw at her whenever
she threatened to leave him. She was not at first a radical in the mold of
reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, believing that women had a human right to
equality with men. Rather, she believed strongly that women, as mothers,
had
a special role to perform in the world.
For Howe, the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to emancipation
might justify its terrible bloodshed. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian
War in 1870 was another story. She remembered:
"I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character
of
the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been
one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question
forced itself upon me, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in
these
matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know
and bear the cost?”
Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and
its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an
“Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would
decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder.” But women did not have to
accept this state of affairs, she wrote. Mothers could command their sons
to
stop the madness.
"Arise, women! Howe commanded. Say firmly: “We will not have great
questions
decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall 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, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another
country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
Howe had her document translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and
Swedish, and distributed it as widely as her extensive contacts made
possible. She believed that her Women’s Peace Movement would be the next
great development in human history, ending war just as the anti-slavery
movement had ended human bondage. She called for a “festival which should
be
observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of
peace doctrines” to be held around the world on June 2 of every year, a
date
that would permit open-air meetings.
Howe organized international peace conferences and American states
developed
their own Mothers’ Day festivals. But Howe quickly gave up on her project.
She realized that there was much to be done before women could come
together
on such a momentous scale. She turned her attention to women’s clubs “to
constitute a working and united womanhood.”
As she worked to unite women, she threw herself into the struggle for
women’s suffrage, understanding that in order to create a more just and
peaceful society, women must take up their rightful place as equal
participants in American politics.
Perhaps Anna Jarvis remembered seeing her mother participate in an original
American Mothers’ Day when she decided to honor her own mother in the early
twentieth century. And while we celebrate modern Mother’s Day in this
momentous year of 2020, it’s worth remembering the original Mothers’ Day,
and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must make their voices heard.
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