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Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother's Day Katharine Lane Antolini. West Virginia University Press, 2014.
Memorializing Motherhood sets out "to illustrate the enmeshed and interdependent ideological trends, traditions, patterns, and even misunderstandings embodied within the day's historic observance, revealing the holiday's cultural significance as a symbolic celebration of Mother's Day's duality" [holiday and cultural representation of motherhood] (3, 2). Antolini tells readers that it matters where one places the apostrophe in Mother's Day, the singular possessive, accentuating the sentimental and private, or the plural possessive (Mothers' Day), stressing "the public dynamics of women's maternal identities" (6). Antolini's historical narrative structurally consists of two major divisions: the first, Chapters One and Two, traces the first origins of Mother's Day and compares five early models to the one begun and fought for by Anna Jarvis, introduced in Chapter Two; the second part explores the noncommercial or philanthropic rivals to Jarvis's model reinterpreted for political, economic, and social welfare agendas (8). Chapter Three treats the twentieth century's encroachment of fathers in domestic roles on the day; Chapters Four and Five examine how organizations Jarvis referenced as "charity charlatans" ironically moved her original vision of the Day into the modern world and actually succeeded in promoting "a richer model of American motherhood" (10). The narrative concludes "with the decline of Jarvis's Mother's Day movement in the 1940s" (11). Antolini finds in the "symbolic celebration of the maternal role" the "intrinsic source of the day's cultural longevity" (158).
As historian, Antolini engages in careful research and marshals evidence in support of her interpretation of Anna Jarvis as tenaciously protective of her "founder status," diligently guarding her version of Mother's Day to the point that it consumed her "financially, physically, and emotionally" (39, 153). Anna Jarvis founded Mother's Day in 1908, when she was fortyfour years old; her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, who had started the Mothers' Day Work Clubs to combat social issues such as infant mortality, was the inspiration for Jarvis's own model of a day that would celebrate, in an idolized way, the mother's individual role, as a day for all to become children again and show gratitude "to the mother who had tenderly watched over them" (42). Ann Reeves Jarvis was a...