When we think of our mothers, we think of the sweet, caring, selfless women who raised us and nearly drove themselves crazy putting up with us. Who would have thought that the mother of Mother's Day actually did?
"She was kind of a loon," said Michael Fahrquar, who profiled Mother's Day founder Anna Jarvis in his Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans.
She never married and never had any children, but was as devoted a daughter to her mother Ann as any woman who ever lived. In fact, her devotion earned the ire of her younger sister Lillie.
"It has been your aim to render me virtually motherless," she wrote in a letter to Anna. "Nothing would help and encourage me like your death."
Perhaps Anna wasn't quite as good a sister as she was a daughter.
When Ann Jarvis died in 1905, Anna worked tirelessly to honor her memory with a service at the church at which Ann taught Sunday school. On the second anniversary of her death, Anna passed out 500 carnations, her mother's favorite flower, to each member of the congregation.
The annual celebration caught on in her home state of West Virginia, and in 1910 it became the first state to officially recognize Mother's Day. Four years later, President Woodrow Wilson signed a joint resolution of Congress establishing the second Sunday of May as a national holiday.
"Sometimes you hear the first part of the Mother's Day story, where this woman was so devoted to her mother that she started this effort to build a memorial to her," Fahrquar said. "But the second half of the story is more interesting to me."
Because that's when Anna got angry.
"Mother's Day took off and she went ballistic because it was over-commercialized and so she spent every bit as much energy destroying the monument she created as she had in making it."
She hated the greeting card makers, hated the candy makers, but hated the florists most of all, since they were making a fortune off of her mother's beloved carnations.
"A printed card means nothing except that you're too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world," Anna once said. "And candy? You take a box to Mother and then eat most of it yourself--a pretty sentiment!"
By the 1930s the U.S. Postal Service announced a commemorative Mother's Day stamp with a portrait of Whistler's Mother on it, and Anna went ballistic.
She even called fellow anti-Mother's Day crusaders (assuming there were any) to action in a press release that asked, in part, "what will you do to rout charlatans, bandits, racketeers, kidnappers, and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest, and truest movements and celebrations."
After decades of fighting against her mother's holiday, including an arrest at an American War Mothers carnation sale, Anna died penniless in a sanitarium in 1948. Although she never knew, the bill for her treatment was paid in part by florists who were grateful for all her work had done for them.
While the latter part of her life is something history (perhaps mercifully) forgot, Anna Jarvis' legacy will forever.
"It's one of those things you take for granted of Mother's Day," Fahrquar said. "But without her, there's a small part of the American fabric that wouldn't have existed."
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