IStock Photo 12698905 © Duncan Walker

Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother’s Day, came to loathe the holiday.

Her mother, Anna Reeves Jarvis, had been an exceptional woman. She had organized a number of Mother’s Day Work Clubs around West Virginia to enlist women in the fight for better healthcare and sanitary conditions for families. She even managed to bring the war-torn citizens of the state together in a “Mother’s Friendship Day” that included both Confederate and Union veterans.

Anna’s father, however, became an abusive alcoholic, perhaps out of grief; only four of the couple’s 11 children survived to adulthood. Though Anna got along well with her two brothers (a bequest by her brother, Claude, supported her for years), her only sister harbored a venomous resentment against her. Lillian, who had been blinded by scarlet fever as a child, accused Anna of stealing her mother’s love from her. “Over the past five years it has been your aim to render me virtually Motherless,” Lillian wrote in 1900. “Nothing would help and encourage me like your death, for you are the one barrier between me and all I deserve.”

Anna never married, though there were rumors of a disastrous love affair. When she was 27, her uncle invited her to move to Chattanooga, Tennessee for a “new life—one worth living,” but Anna remained with her mother and sister until her father died. At that point she, her sister Lillian, and their mother moved to Philadelphia to live near Claude. Though Anna found friends and employment in the advertising department of an insurance company, after her mother’s death in 1905 she plunged into obsessive melancholy. Her despair only dissipated when she began a campaign to create a national day honoring mothers, on the second Sunday of May—the Sunday closest to her own mother’s death. The apostrophe placement in Mother’s Day would indicate it was a time to honor one’s own mother, and it was to be set on the “holy” day of Sunday, to distinguish it from ordinary holidays.

Anna quit her job and put what she had learned in advertising to work promoting her personal cause. The first Mother’s Day commemoration, in 1907, was a simple affair at the Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where her mother had been a Sunday School teacher. Anna provided 500 white carnations—her mother’s favorite flower—to the parishioners. In Philadelphia, her campaign attracted the support of department store magnate John Wanamaker, who said he “would rather have the honor of establishing this Mother’s Day than...be the King of England.” In 1910, the governor of West Virginia issued the first Mother’s Day proclamation, and other states quickly fell in line. In 1914, Congress officially recognized Mother’s Day, noting “the American mother is the greatest source of the country’s strength and inspiration.” Today, the odds an adult will plan to celebrate Mother’s Day are 1 in 1.19 (84%), and 1 in 3.23 considers it one of the nation’s most important holidays.

Mother’s Day proved to be a boon for many. Politicians could make sentimental speeches about sacred womanhood; John F. Kennedy’s grandfather, Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, attracted 20,000 mothers and children to a picnic in Boston. It was good for churches: Ministers held special services, and the tradition of wearing a flower to church on Mother’s Day helped boost attendance. Confectioners, florists, and greeting card companies loved it. Even the military promoted it. In 1918, every soldier was ordered to write his mother on May 12. On that day at Camp Sherman in Ohio, Miss Anna Jarvis spoke, after which 42,000 soldiers were ordered to stand at attention for one minute in honor of their mothers, and to recite the Lord’s Prayer in unison. Ohio florists provided each soldier with a carnation.

But Anna Jarvis soon became repelled by the commercialization of “her” day. She ridiculed those who would send a card to their mothers, saying they were “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.” (Today, 1 in 1.19 adults who celebrate Mother’s Day plan to give a greeting card.) She trademarked the white carnation, in an attempt to keep florists from making a profit, and as for the practice of bringing Mom chocolates, she railed, “You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment!”

In 1923, Anna filed suit against Al Smith, the governor of New York, who had planned a Mother’s Day celebration. When the court refused to stop the event, Miss Jarvis began a public protest that resulted in her arrest. She stormed the podium at the convention of the Associated Retail Confectioners of the United States, demanding they stop using her “beautiful idea” to sell candy. When she refused to leave, the convention adjourned. She disrupted a meeting of the American War Mothers, sued the government to stop a postage stamp with “Mother’s Day” on it, and even clashed with Eleanor Roosevelt, who wanted to enlist the holiday in her fundraising efforts to reduce high maternal child death rates—a cause that had been close to the heart of Anna’s own mother.

No one was safe from her wrath, not even former allies like John Wanamaker. According to one assistant, when Anna spied a “ Mother’s Day Salad” on the menu in Wanamaker’s tea room, “she ordered it, dumped it on the floor, got up and left.”

Blind, deaf, and penniless, Anna Jarvis spent her last years in a nursing home, where she was secretly supported by those she hated most: the florists. A reporter who visited the 84-year-old shortly before her death in 1948 got her final verdict on her life’s work. “She told me with great bitterness, that she was sorry she had ever started Mother’s Day.”