By Kristine Phillips, The Washington PostWhile dining at a Philadelphia tearoom owned by her friend John Wanamaker, Anna Jarvis ordered a salad - then dumped it on the floor.
Jarvis spent decades fighting an uphill battle to keep Mother’s Day from becoming the commercialized holiday that it is today. To her, it was simply a day to honor mothers, and she started it to commemorate her own. So when people co-opted her idea for other purposes, Jarvis was incensed. If she were alive today, Antolini said, Jarvis would have been thrilled that Mother’s Day remains popular.She would probably be equally angered to know that the holiday is celebrated in part through Mother’s Day specials and sales, Hallmark cards and floral arrangements.
After one lecture in 1876, Ann Reeves Jarvis prayed that somebody would create a day commemorating mothers for their service to humanity, Antolini said.Her mother died in 1905, and Jarvis, then in her 40s, promised at her gravesite that she’d be the one to answer her prayer. From there, Mother’s Day took off so quickly that the next year, Sonora Smart Dodd - who was raised by her father after her mother died in childbirth - heard a Mother’s Day sermon in Spokane, Wash., and helped create Father’s Day. In 1910, West Virginia passed a law designating Mother’s Day a holiday, and other states followed.She continued writing letters and traveling, all on her own dime, to make Mother’s Day a national holiday.
She threatened to sue New York Gov. Al Smith over plans for a Mother’s Day meeting in 1923, according to a Post obituary published in 1948. In 1931, she fought with New York first lady Eleanor Roosevelt over a rival Mother’s Day committee.At one point, she incorporated the Mother’s Day International Association. It’s unclear whether the corporation had other members, according to the obituary.
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