MOTHER’S DAY
The Mother and Daughter Behind Mother’s Day
Anna Jarvis came to loathe the holiday she pushed to create in honor of her mother.
The founder of Mother’s Day boycotted and protested her own idea as it became a commercialized for-profit venture, starting with simple white carnations.
But before delving into how everything went so wrong, we need to know about Anna’s mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis.
Ann bore twelve children in the late eighteen hundreds. Eight of them would die tragically before reaching adulthood, of measles, typhoid, and other epidemics and diseases prevalent at the time.
While pregnant with child number six, Ann somehow found time to take on the social problems of the day, especially sanitation and childhood diseases.
It was obvious to Ann that unsanitary conditions had much to do with the loss of her children and so many others.
Ann founded “Mother’s Friendly Day” to improve sanitation and health for both Union and Confederate encampments undergoing a typhoid outbreak and near the end of the Civil War, in 1865, she…
