Simpson: "Perfect Mothers, Perfect Flowers"

Why did the production and presentation of flowers become so central to celebrating Mother’s Day in the United States? By drawing on gendered ideas of purity, gentleness, and love, Kaitlin Simpson argues, U.S. florists and flower growers helped Mother's Day blossom into one of the top holidays for flower sales.  

Kaitlin A. Simpson is a graduate student at the University of Tennessee and 2022 recipient of the Agricultural History Society’s Graduate Student Research Grant. Her research focuses on the history of the cut flower industry in the United States and Colombia. 

We welcome essays that apply the stories and methodologies of our allied fields to the issues that currently affect our daily lives. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Adrienne Petty at ampetty@wm.edu or Drew Swanson at dswanson@georgiasouthern.edu. This post should be cited as: Kaitlin Simpson, “Perfect Mothers, Perfect Flowers: Gender and the Cut Flower Industry’s Creation of a Commercialized Mother’s Day,” The Short Rows, 10 May 2023. https://www.aghistorysociety.org/ahs-blog/simpson-perfect-mothers-perfect-flowers

Perfect Mothers, Perfect Flowers: Gender and the Cut Flower Industry’s Creation of a Commercialized Mother’s Day 

Kaitlin Simpson

Figure 1: Mother's Day Bouquets. Photo by the author.

The celebration of Mother’s Day is a highly commercial affair. In 2022, U.S. consumers spent over $31.7 billion on gifts, with the average person spending around $240 to celebrate their mothers. Although presents range from jewelry to special outings, gift cards to clothing, flowers are one of the holiday’s most common gifts. Seventy-two percent of Mother’s Day gift-givers will purchase flowers for the mothers in their lives. Together, they will spend over $2.9 billion on flowers alone, making the holiday one of the top-selling days of the year for U.S. retail florists.[1]  

The link between flowers and Mother’s Day dates back to the very beginning of the holiday. Indeed, this yearly celebration of motherhood might not still exist, or be nearly as popular, had it not been for the cut flower industry’s efforts to encourage its celebration and Mother’s Day consumption. To increase sales, retail florists and growers of the early twentieth century played on the era’s notions of “proper” motherhood, linking the day with femininity, purity, and domesticity – qualities they also saw as inherent in flowers themselves.

The cut flower industry of the early twentieth century consisted of a closely connected network of small-scale, family-owned retail florists and growers. Florists were the face of the industry, then as now, dealing directly with customers to order, arrange, and sell flowers and bouquets. Urban florists sourced their flowers from independent growers in the local countryside who worked behind the scenes to cultivate and harvest the popular flowers of the season. Flowers are fickle, and weather changes could greatly impact flower availability and quality. To mitigate some of these difficulties, growers often produced their flowers in expensive, heated greenhouses that kept the plants warm and protected, especially during winter months. Because flowers are also highly perishable and begin to wither as soon as they are cut from the plant, most early twentieth-century growers were located close to population centers, with the heart of the industry centered in the Northeast and Midwest to provide flowers to cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.

As a non-consumable agricultural product, the value of flowers lay in their beauty and symbolic power as gifts of love, affection, and appreciation. Because of this, flower production and sales were more closely tied to the U.S holiday calendar than the natural blooming season of flowering plants. At the turn of the twentieth century, Christmas and Easter were the two largest days of the year for flower sales. Decoration Day (today’s Memorial Day), Thanksgiving, and even Halloween also represented important days for florists and growers. Because their industry was so reliant on the holiday calendar, florists were always searching for the next holiday from which they could profit. It is of little surprise, therefore, that Mother’s Day quickly caught their eye.

Figure 2: Anna Jarvis c. 1916. from “Mother’s Day: First Suggested by the American Florist, May 16, 1908,” The American Florist 46, no. 1455 (April 22, 1916): 722. Public Domain.

Anna Reeves Jarvis died on May 9, 1905, quite unaware that her death would create a new holiday. After her death, her daughter – also named Anna Jarvis – decided that the best way to honor her mother’s memory was to set aside the second Sunday in May, the date of her passing, as a day specifically dedicated to celebrating mothers. After a three-year campaign, Jarvis succeeded in organizing Mother’s Day church services in Grafton, West Virginia, as well as several congregations throughout Pennsylvania in 1908. Jarvis selected the white carnation, her mother’s favorite flower, as a symbol for the holiday. She personally donated 500 white carnations to the congregants in Grafton and encouraged men and women to wear the flowers on their lapels in remembrance of their mothers and all they had sacrificed for their upbringing.[2]

From the beginning, celebrants suffused Mother’s Day celebrations and the flowers that adorned them with early twentieth-century gendered stereotypes. In an article published in The Pittsburgh Press a few days after the first Mother’s Day services, Reverend Yahn, the preacher at a participating Pennsylvanian congregation, lauded the white carnation as the perfect way to celebrate motherhood and women’s work. He argued that although men rightly had their services memorialized in monuments of stone, a mother, “of tender hand and heart” should “have her recognition in the white flower, which is pure, tender, fragrant, beautiful.”[3]

From the outset, then, men and women celebrating Mother’s Day linked the delicateness of flowers, along with their pleasant beauty and sweet aroma, to femininity and the qualities supposedly inherent in a good, proper mother. The white color, similarly, stood in as a symbol of purity, an idea perpetuated by both the racial and gendered tensions swirling in the U.S. during the early twentieth century. In an era of increased immigration in the North and the institutionalization of racial segregation in the South, white northerners and southerners wrestled with how to define whiteness and solidify white supremacy in American society. They often did so through visual and literary imagery that linked whiteness, both the color and the race, with civilization, order, beauty, purity, and “proper” feminine domesticity.[4] The carnation, therefore, with its bright white color and its soft, ruffled petals, encapsulated and perpetuated these ideologies in a single, wearable flower.  

Imbued with this powerful symbolism, the link between white flowers and motherhood soon gained traction. It received an added boost from U.S. literary giant Mark Twain, who was an early and avid supporter of Mother’s Day. Speaking to a newspaper columnist, the author gushed about how nothing could “be more beautiful than that which prompts every man, woman, and child to pay tribute to those dear ones to whom we owe so much.” He then enthusiastically agreed to “wear a white carnation, the emblem of purity and mother love.”[5] The irony was that the white carnation was not originally chosen as the appropriate flower to wear on Mother’s Day because it symbolized purity, tenderness, and beauty. Rather, Anna Jarvis chose the white carnation because it was her deceased mother’s favorite.

This technicality mattered little for those celebrating the day, and demand for white carnations continued to grow. The flower industry quickly took note. Just a few days after the first celebrations, Philadelphia florists reflected on its popularity, noting how “without warning a demand sprung up on Saturday morning which continued and kept the boys on the go all day long. Everything in white flowers sold out clean, the principal demand being for white carnations.” From this first celebration, florists and growers recognized the potential of Mother’s Day as a flower holiday. One florist even predicted that “with the favorable way in which the idea of Mother’s Day was received that it will become, in time, one of the great flower days of the year.”[6]

But to fulfill this dream, the cut flower industry had to act. By 1912, florists in cities across the U.S. began participating in cooperative advertising campaigns to boost flower sales during this increasingly popular holiday.[7] These cooperative Mother’s Day advertisements often took the form of an entire newspaper page of collective advertisements bearing the information of several of the town’s florists. Primarily aimed at men, these ads were peppered with gendered language reifying the idea that a mother’s domain was within the home and outlining the qualities necessary in a mother “worthy” of celebration.[8]

Figure 3: The Salt Lake Tribune Mother's Day Advertisements from “Mother’s Day,” The Salt Lake Tribune, May 11, 1916. Public Domain

Salt Lake City florists, for example, published a page of Mother’s Day advertisements in the May 11, 1916 issue of The Salt Lake City Tribune. The top of the page bore an illustration of a kind-looking mother on one side holding a picture of her adult son. Beside this image, the caption celebrates motherhood, noting that “It is fitting that we should honor the memory of those who gave their lives for their country, heroes like Washington and Lincoln. But our mothers who in quiet ways made sacrifices as great as theirs deserve also to be remembered.” The ads encouraged readers to recognize and respect the sacrifice of motherhood, even exalting it to an importance equal with the nation’s most popular presidents. At the same time, they also perpetuated the idea that a woman’s greatest duty and contribution to the country was to perform her proper role within the home.[9]

These gendered advertising campaigns proved successful. Year after year, Mother’s Day continued to grow. By 1930, florists counted the day alongside Christmas and Easter as one of the largest flower holidays of the year, with some even calling it “the biggest of all floral holidays.”[10]

The expansion of Mother’s Day created problems in addition to opportunities for the U.S. cut flower industry. Growers often struggled to produce the quantity of blooms needed to meet demand, as a cold or gloomy week could put blooms behind schedule and cause a shortage. The customary demand for a particular flower – the white carnation – only added to these Mother’s Day supply difficulties. The natural carnation blooming season is mid-summer. Carnations demanded hot, sunny weather to produce blooms at the rate needed to keep up with these demands – conditions that were not always present in early May. [11]  

Florists and growers tried several ways to fix this particular supply issue. First, retail florists began to look past Anna Jarvis’s insistence that white carnations were the only flower appropriate for Mother’s Day. Florists across the U.S. started to push consumers to buy white carnations only for mothers who had passed away and to celebrate living mothers with colorful carnations.[12] By 1915, florists even condensed this idea into a short poem that circulated in newspapers across the U.S.: “A mother dead; honor with a flower white, / A mother living, wear a flower bright.”[13]

Figure 4: Mother's Day Basket from “Mothers’ Day Preparations,” The American Florist 52, no. 1613 (May 3, 1919): 738. Public Domain

Merely expanding the color of carnations was not enough for florists. Industry representatives also pushed to incorporate all flowers into the Mother’s Day tradition. These efforts succeeded, and by 1922 florists in Cleveland, Ohio, reported that carnations were no longer even their best sellers on Mother’s Day; they had been replaced by flowers like roses and sweet peas.[14] Carnations would continue to make up a large portion of Mother’s Day sales for years to come. But supply issues and a continuing desire to increase Mother’s Day consumption ensured that all flowers eventually found their place in the celebration and that florists continued to make a pretty profit from their sale.

Not everyone agreed with the cut flower industry’s efforts to commercialize and alter the day’s celebrations. The harshest critic was Anna Jarvis herself. As early as 1922, Jarvis, who once supported floral advertising campaigns and even helped to organize some of her own, began to criticize florists for over-commercializing her sentimental holiday. She began publishing articles in newspapers stating that “flowers are barred,” from her special day and that men and women should instead celebrate mothers by purchasing small flags or Mother’s Day pins.[15] Her efforts proved futile. Mother’s Day had grown beyond the control of its founder. The gendered advertising efforts of florists and growers across the United States had already ensured that flowers, regardless of their color or type, would remain the perfect way to celebrate mothers on their special day.

The work of the cut flower industry to expand Mother’s Day and other floral holidays would have a dramatic impact on cut flower production itself. To solve continuing supply issues, florists took advantage of improved transportation technologies like refrigerated trucking and cheaper air travel to source their flowers from locations where it was cheaper and easier to grow cut flowers all year around. By 1960, California and Florida had surpassed Pennsylvania and New York as the top flower-producing states, and those states’ growers shipped their blooms to florists all across the nation.[16] Their dominance over the industry would not last very long, however. No longer constrained by the limits of local production, flower entrepreneurs began to look overseas for an ideal location where low-cost labor and a year-round mild climate would make growing cut flowers highly profitable. That place proved to be Bogotá, Colombia. The rise of the Bogotá trade would kick-start a huge increase in U.S. cut flower imports. Today, over seventy percent of the cut flowers sold in the United States are grown in other countries. Of those, eighty percent come from Colombia and Ecuador.[17]

Mother’s Day is now bigger than ever before. Annual flower sales have reached almost $3 billion and the industry imports millions of flowers each year from Latin American growers to meet demand. Even so, U.S. florists continue to rely on advertisements that depict society’s vision of “perfect” motherhood, even if that definition has become more inclusive of single or working mothers as well as mothers from diverse cultural or racial backgrounds. For example, a 2019 advertisement from Teleflora, “Love Like a Mother,” humorously depicts people performing motherly acts towards fellow adults, including helping them blow their nose, covering a sleeping coworker with a jacket, or telling a stranger not to stay up too late. Through these scenarios, the commercial illustrates the unique, sacrificial, and caring love that society dictates a mother should have for her children.[18]

Similarly, a 2017 commercial for The Bouqs Company shows women baking, folding laundry, and picking up children’s toys while encouraging consumers to buy flowers for “all the moms in your life, from working moms to mister moms,” as a way to celebrate “all the things we see mom do, and the millions of things we don’t.”[19] While the commercial expands motherhood beyond a purely domestic and feminine sphere (in name, at least, as most of the advertisement still portrays women performing domestic tasks), a mother’s work remains intimate, gentle, and hidden, at least until her sacrifice is brought into the light by a fragile, delicate, and demurely beautiful bouquet on Mother’s Day. Behind these Mother’s Day bouquets, however, is a broader story – one that speaks to how commodity capitalists exploit societal gender stereotypes to profit from love and affection on our year’s most sentimental holidays.

Figure 5: Mother's Day Bouquets including pink carnations, a classic Mother's Day flower. Photo by the author.

[1]D. Tighe, “Mother’s Day Expenditure by Category U.S. 2022,” Statista, June 3, 2022, https://www.statista.com/statistics/289506/us-mother-s-day-expenditure-by-category/; Mary McGinty, “Mother’s Day Spending to Reach Record High,” National Retail Federation, April 21, 2022, https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/mothers-day-spending-reach-record-high.

[2] Katharine Lane Antolini, Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2014), 37-51. 

[3]S.G. Yahn, “Minister Endorses Mothers’ Day Idea,” The Pittsburgh Press, May 13, 1908.

[4]Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 134-50; Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1999); Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Russ Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

[5]“Mothers’ Day,” Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, New York), May 5, 1908.

[6]“Philadelphia: Mother’s Day Causes Demand,” The American Florist 30, no. 1041 (May 16, 1908): 840.

[7]“Mother’s Day: First Suggested by the American Florist, May 16, 1908,” The American Florist 46, no. 1455 (April 22, 1916): 721.

[8]For examples of these see “Mother’s Day,” The Salt Lake Tribune, May 11, 1916; “Send your Mother Flowers and Wear One Yourself on Sunday May 9th Mother’s Day,” The Journal and Tribune (Knoxville, Tennessee), May 8, 1920; “Mother’s Day Sunday, May 12th,” The Salt Lake Tribune, May 10, 1918; “She Thought Only of You, Show Your Appreciation: Mother’s Day,” Battle Creek Enquirer, May 8, 1924.

[9]“Mother’s Day,” The Salt Lake Tribune. 

[10]“Your Mother’s Day Advertising: Here Is an Opportunity to Direct Your Sales Appeal to Every Individual Regardless of Class, Culture or Income,” The American Florist 72, no. 2185 (May 3, 1930): 8.

[11]Kasia Boddy, Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 41.

[12]“Mothers’ Day and the Florist,” Florists’ Review 25, no. 647 (1910): 5. 

[13]Ivan Gaddis, “Day of Homage to Motherhood: Next Sunday Set Aside for Observation Which Has Become Nation-Wide,” The Hastings Daily Republican, May 7, 1915.

[14]“Toledo, O: Mothers’ Day Business Great Success,” The American Florist 58, no. 1773 (May 27, 1922): 944.

[15]“Mothers’ Day,” The American Florist 58, no. 1770 (May 6, 1922): 777–78; “Would Make Mother’s Day Last Entire Week and Strew Flowers in Her Pathway,” The Salina Daily Union (Salina, KS), May 7, 1922.

[16]Census of Agriculture, Table IX –Nursery, Greenhouse, and Forest Products 1929-1959, United States Census Bureau, Retrieved from https://agcensus.library.cornell.edu/census_year/1959-census/.  

[17]For more on the transition to Colombian cut flower production see María Angélica Arbeláez, Marcela Meléndez, and Nicolás León, “The Emergence of Fresh Cut-Flower Exports in Colombia,” in Export Pioneers in Latin America (Cambridge, Mass.: Inter-American Development Bank and David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Harvard University, 2012), 69-100. Marta Pizano, “The USA Flower Market: AGOA Strategy and Action Plan – End Market Analysis,” USAID East Africa Trade and Investment Hub, 2017; “Cut Flowers (HS: 0603) Product Trade, Exporters and Importers,” OEC, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Collective Learning Group, 27 December 2021, https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/cut-flowers.   

[18]“Teleflora: Love Like A Mother By Wonderful Agency,” The Drum, April 2019, https://www.thedrum.com/creative-works/project/wonderful-agency-teleflora-love-mother.

[19]The Bouqs Company Mother’s Day Collection TV Spot, “All the Moms in Your Life,” Commercial, 2017, https://www.ispot.tv/ad/w7IY/thebouqs-com-mothers-day-collection-all-the-moms-in-your-life.