The woman who started Mother's Day later tried to abolish it

On May 10, 1908, a church in Grafton, West Virginia, held a service to honor mothers. Anna Jarvis had arranged it in memory of her own mother, Ann, who had taught Sunday school there and had died three years earlier. Jarvis did not attend. She sent a telegram and 500 white carnations, her mother's favorite flower, and spoke that day at the Wanamaker department store's auditorium in Philadelphia.

Then she campaigned. She wrote to business leaders, church groups and politicians, gave up her job at an insurance company, and in 1912 set up the Mother's Day International Association. She trademarked the name, and she was particular about the apostrophe: Mother's, singular, so that each family would honor its own mother. On May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first national Mother's Day, on the second Sunday in May.

Within a few years the day had become big business for florists, candy makers and greeting card companies. White carnations got more expensive, and florists began promoting colored carnations for people whose mothers were alive, keeping white for those whose mothers had died.

Jarvis fought back. She had a Mother's Day badge made as a lasting alternative to the flower. She said a printed card meant you were "too lazy to write" to the woman who had done more for you than anyone. As for candy, she said, you took a box to Mother and then ate most of it yourself.

Others made money from the day, and Jarvis did not. She spent her inheritance fighting what it had become and ended up living with her sister. In 1943 she began organizing a petition to have Mother's Day rescinded. It stopped when she was placed in a sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

She died there on November 24, 1948, at the age of 84. She had never married and had no children.