When she found that her house was too small to serve as an office, she bought the house next store. Soon she was invited to visit other cities to speak before various organizations. She wrote and printed booklets about her plan, distributing them free. All these activities ate deeply into her inheritance, but Anna never allowed this to bother her.

These were the days when other militant women were fighting for suffrage. Anna Jarvis’s aims were more sentimental, less controversial. How could a legislator fight anything as sweet and pure and idealistic as a Mother’s Day? West Virginia was the first state officially to adopt the holiday; then Pennsylvania and others joined the march.

Anna Jarvis, inspired by these first triumphs, continued to write, travel, and speak. In 1914, her eloquence persuaded Representative J. Thomas Heflin of Alabama and Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas to present a joint resolution for the nationwide observance of Mother’s Day. The resolution was passed by both houses of Congress.

Anna’s real hour of glory came when President Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation which urged that the second Sunday in May (the anniversary of her mother’s death) be observed as Mother’s Day. For Anna this triumph was not enough. There was still the rest of the world to conquer. So the writing, the speechmaking, the exhorting booklets continued, on an international scale. She was remarkably successful. In the course of her life forty-three other countries adopted Mother’s Day.

Unfortunately, the triumph was mixed with frustration. “They’re commercializing my Mother’s Day,” she was presently writing in despair to hundreds of newspapers. “This is not what I intended. I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not of profit.”

For some reason she regarded florists as her principal “enemies.” Not that she didn’t despise manufacturers of greeting cards and candy, and everybody else who made money off her Day. But the florists represented something special; they were profiting from her mother’s favorite flower, the white carnation.

Officials of the florists’ organization came to her. “We didn’t start this, Miss Jarvis,” they explained. “But now we can’t stop it, and we can’t help profiting by it. People demand flowers.”

By now the money Anna had inherited was gone. Suddenly, she locked herself up in the North Twelfth Street house, alone with her sister, and refused to receive anybody. For years she kept the world out of her life. She died in 1948 in the Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

One Mother’s Day before she died a reporter, pretending he was delivering a package, managed to see her. “She told me, with terrible bitterness, that she was sorry she had started Mother’s Day.”
—from Reader’s Digest

***

Jean Bokassa, president of the Central African Republic, is another one of those daring and innovative Third World leaders. To honor Mother’s Day this year, Bokassa ordered all the rapists, child molesters, and mother killers taken out of the country’s jails, brought to the C.A.R capital of Bangul, and beaten to death in the market square. And we’ll bet you just sent flowers.
—Oui, 1974