The Holiday She Tried to Kill

Today is Mother's Day — the second Sunday in May, observed by millions across America. It was created by one woman, who spent the rest of her life trying to destroy it.

Today, May 10, 2026, Americans will spend an estimated $35 billion on their mothers — on flowers, brunches, greeting cards, jewelry, spa days, and everything in between. It is the third-largest card-giving occasion of the year. Florists will sell roughly three-quarters of all celebrants their traditional bouquets. And somewhere in the history of all this commercial enthusiasm is a woman named Anna Jarvis, who never married, never had children, spent her entire personal fortune fighting this holiday she created, and died penniless in a sanitarium in Pennsylvania in 1948 — with her medical bills, according to legend, paid by the florists she had devoted her later years to destroying. The story of Mother's Day is one of the most bittersweet origin stories in American history: a daughter's pure act of love, transformed into exactly what she feared most, by the very forces she tried hardest to resist.

A Daughter's Promise, and What Became of It

Anna Jarvis was born in 1864 in Webster, West Virginia, the ninth of eleven children — seven of whom died in infancy. Her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, was a woman of extraordinary civic energy: in 1858, she had organized "Mothers' Day Work Clubs" across Appalachia to teach local women about hygiene, clean water, and infant care, at a time when typhoid and diphtheria swept through communities with devastating regularity. During the Civil War, Ann Jarvis nursed wounded soldiers on both sides and organized a Mother's Friendship Day to ease tensions between Union and Confederate families. When Ann died in 1905, her daughter Anna was devastated. She had heard her mother pray, years earlier, that "someone, sometime, will found a memorial mothers day." Anna resolved to answer that prayer. On May 10, 1908 — exactly 118 years before today — she organized the first official Mother's Day celebration at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, sending 500 white carnations, her mother's favorite flower, for attendees to wear. Simultaneously, she addressed a gathering of 15,000 people at the Wanamaker's department store auditorium in Philadelphia. She then launched a relentless letter-writing campaign to politicians, ministers, newspaper editors, and business executives across the country. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson designated the second Sunday of May a national holiday, dedicated, in his words, "to the best mother in the world, your mother." Anna Jarvis had won.

The victory lasted approximately six years. By the early 1920s, florists were hoarding white carnations and jacking up prices every May. Greeting card companies discovered there was a fortune to be made in pre-printed sentiment. Candy makers, jewelers, and restaurateurs followed. Jarvis had conceived of Mother's Day as an intimate, personal occasion — she was fiercely specific even about grammar, insisting that "Mother's" be singular, meaning each person's own mother, not a collective celebration. She wanted handwritten letters, not purchased cards. "A printed card means nothing," she wrote, "except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world." By the 1920s, she was storming confectioners' conventions in Philadelphia to protest candy companies tying their sales to the holiday. She crashed an American War Mothers meeting and threw their carnations when she discovered they were selling flowers to raise funds. She was arrested for disturbing the peace. She sued organizations for using the phrase "Mother's Day" commercially, spending her personal fortune on litigation she almost never won. She publicly clashed with Eleanor Roosevelt for using Mother's Day to raise money for maternal mortality causes — causes that, in any other context, her own mother might have championed. In 1943, she began organizing a petition to have Mother's Day legally rescinded. Friends had her committed to a sanitarium before she could file it. She died there, in 1948, aged 84, with nothing left.

A woman in early 20th century dress holds white carnations — the flower Anna Jarvis chose as the symbol of Mother's Day at its 1908 founding

White carnations — Anna Jarvis's chosen symbol for Mother's Day, representing, in her words, "the truth, purity and broad-charity of a mother's love." By the 1920s, florists had begun substituting red and pink carnations when white ones sold out. Jarvis never forgave them.

There is something in the Anna Jarvis story that seems worth holding onto today, on the 118th Mother's Day, as the brunch reservations fill and the flower deliveries arrive. Not to reject the flowers or the brunches — those are lovely — but to remember what the holiday was, at its origin, before any of it: a daughter who heard her mother pray for a day of recognition, and who spent the rest of her life making sure that prayer was answered, and then fighting to keep the answer honest. Ann Reeves Jarvis had organized mothers' clubs in Appalachia in 1858. She had nursed soldiers on both sides of a civil war. She had buried seven of her eleven children. She had prayed, in a Sunday school class, that someone would found a day in honor of what mothers do. Her daughter did — and then spent forty years defending the integrity of that day with a ferocity that broke her. Whatever you do today for the mother in your life, Anna Jarvis's actual wish was simple: that you take the time to write it down yourself, in your own words, from the heart. The florists will survive without a little more business. The words are the thing.