Later Martha notes that the letters people sent for publication tended to be negative, even enraged, suggesting that no normal person would ever have such feelings about their mother. Yet the private response seemed to be saying, “I’m so relieved that I’m normal.” Martha concluded: “I believe the intensity of both the rage and the relief come from the same source. You’re not supposed to acknowledge the ambivalence you may feel for a parent or a child. The people who were enraged have feelings they don’t dare face in themselves. These are feelings that people are terribly guilty about or terribly frightened about.”

I am unable to reprint Martha’s controversial article, but this is its telling opening sentence:
“Mother’s Day, bittersweet.”

Dear Momma, it’s Mother’s Day, and I’m first in line,
To tell the world “The Greatest” is grateful you’re mine!
For raising and teaching, the world’s prettiest son,
Between you and me, you’re Number One!
—Mother’s Day poem written by Muhammad Ali for the Ladies’ Home Journal, 1977

***

One day in 1925 a tall, energetic, determined-looking woman walked into a Philadelphia hotel and marched up to a group of War Mothers, who were holding a convention. In loud tones she harangued the group, denouncing them for selling Mother’s Day white carnations at a profit. Several people tried to calm her, but she was too angry to be stopped. Finally, a policeman was called, and the irate woman was arrested for disturbing the peace. Thus ended one more incident in the stormy career of Miss Anna Jarvis, who was the prime mover in establishing Mother’s Day.

When Miss Jarvis was released by an embarrassed magistrate, a reporter went to see her at her home on North Twelfth Street in Philadelphia. Miss Jarvis, a handsome gray-haired woman of sixty, sat in a straight-backed chair, facing a portrait of her mother.

“Miss Jarvis,” he asked, “why can’t you stop fighting the world? You ought to be proud that you’re the founder of Mother’s Day.”

“They’re commercializing it,” she answered. “Did you read what I wrote President Coolidge?”

He nodded. The letter had been in the newspapers. She had said, “I’m trying in every way possible to prevent Mother’s Day from being desecrated by the greed of individuals and organizations who see in it only a way to make money.”

“But, Miss Jarvis,” the reporter argued, “nobody is profiting from Mother’s Day in any unethical way. After all, it was you who spent years urging that the white carnation be made the emblem of Mother’s Day. It was you who urged people to send messages of love by card or telegram to their mothers.”

“In other words,” Miss Jarvis said, “you’re telling me that my success is also my defeat. Well, you’re right, young man. That happens to be the paradox of my life.”

It was not the only paradox in Anna Jarvis’s life. Though she was an extremely attractive woman, she never married. In Grafton, West Virginia, where she was born in 1864, she had grown into a tall, red-haired beauty. Why did such a girl remain single?

“She had a disastrous love affair when she was young,” a friend of the family said. “It left her shocked and disillusioned, and thereafter she turned her back on all men.”

When she left Mary Baldwin College in 1883 she threw herself into teaching school in Grafton. Not that she needed the salary. Her widowed mother was well-to-do. A few years later Anna, her mother, and Anna’s blind younger sister, Elsinore, moved to Philadelphia. Anna took a job as assistant in the advertising department of an insurance company. Through her twenties and thirties, that was her life. Then in 1905, her mother died. It was a blow, of course, but it marked the beginning of a vital new era for Anna Jarvis.

She was forty-one, mistress of a fine home, guardian of her blind sister and chief beneficiary of her mother’s estate. During the period of mourning, she conceived her vision: the establishment of a Mother’s Day for everybody.

She suggested her idea to Mayor Reyburn of Philadelphia. That was the beginning of Anna Jarvis’s crusade in which she insisted that deference be paid to living mothers, as well as to those who had died. From her home she conducted one of the strangest and most effective letter-writing campaigns in history. She wrote to governors, congressmen, clergymen, industrialists, women’s clubs—to anybody who could wield influence. The mail that came in answer to these letters was so overwhelming—and demanded so much additional correspondence—that Anna gave up her job to devote herself wholly to her campaign.