It’s Mother’s Day week (Sunday, May 10), which means flowers, brunch reservations, and a guilt-induced rush on greeting cards. But here’s a story I bet you didn’t know. The woman who fought to make Mother’s Day a national holiday spent the rest of her life trying to destroy it.
Her name was Anna Jarvis. In 1908 she organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration to honor her own mom. By 1914 it was a federal holiday. By the 1920s, Hallmark had entered the chat, florists were marking up...