Anna Jarvis founded Mother’s Day in the early 1900s, starting as what she called a Mother’s Friendship Day to try to form unity between Confederate and Union mothers. This fueled her mission to create a day that would honor mothers all over the country. It started as a Mother’s Day church service and became widely publicized and also highly criticized by members of the senate.
Nowadays, Mother’s Day is celebrated by most everyone across the country. However, if it were up to Anna Jarvis, that would not be the case. Just fifteen years after starting the movement of celebrating mothers, Jarvis began telling people to stop celebrating Mother’s Day. She felt that it had become too much of a commercial holiday and had lost its meaning.
Jarvis applied for a trademark for the words “Mother’s Day”, but she was denied. FTD, a leading flower company, offered to give her a percentage of sales of carnations for Mother’s Day, but this made her angrier at the commercialization of the holiday. She even fought against charities that included Mother’s Day in their fundraiser marketing and protested the sale of carnations. One of Jarvis’s last public appearances was petitioning for the abolition of Mother’s Day.