Anna's Campaign for Mother's Day
Historical Account★★★★Anna thus began a campaign to establish a national Mother’s Day. She and her supporters began to write a constant stream of letters to ministers, businessmen, politicians and newspaper editors. She spent a fortune trying to attract attention to her idea, and took every opportunity to give speeches, send telegrams, or write articles promoting her cause. On the second anniversary of her mother’s death, May 12, 1907, Anna led a small tribute to her mother at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia.
She donated five hundred white carnations, her mother’s favorite flower, to be worn by everyone in attendance. On this first Mother’s Day service, the pastor used the text, “Woman, behold thy son; Son, behold thy mother;’ John 19:26) That same day a special service was held at the Wannamaker Auditorium in Philadelphia, which could seat no more than a third of the fifteen thousand people who showed up. After that, things begin to take off.
Various states jumped on the bandwagon, officially proclaiming a Mother’s Day each ===◊=== Rocking Destiny The hand that rocks the cradle rules the nation and its destiny. -SO UTH AFRICAN PROVERB === ◊=== year, and, in 1914 , President Woodrow Wilson officially established Mother’s Day a national holiday to be held on the second Sunday of May. But having succeeded at last, Anna Jarvis soon became embittered by the commercialization of the holiday and turned against it, actually filing a lawsuit to stop a 1923 Mother’s Day festival.
She was even arrested for disturbing the peace at a mother’s convention where women sold white carnations. “This is not what I intended,” Jarvis growled. “I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit!” “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” she said on another occasion.
“And candy! You take a box to Mother-and then eat most of it yourself.
A pretty sentiment.” Shortly before her death in 1948, Anna Jarvis, living in a nursing home, received Mother’s Day cards from all around the world.
But she told a reporter she was sorry she had ever started the whole thing. We aren’t.
The point
Anna Jarvis's tireless campaign to establish Mother's Day succeeded, but she spent her final years embittered by its commercialization.