Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis and Anna Jarvis Mother's Day is
something of a curiosity to me -- my mother always insisted the
holiday was invented by florists and she would have nothing to
do with it. It turns out that she was not at all original in
thinking such a thing; Anna Jarvis, the woman who popularized
the observance in the United States in the early 20th century
agreed so much that she called florists and others making money
on Mother's Day "charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers,
kidnappers and other termites." Anna Jarvis is said to have come
up with the idea for a Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May
after her own mother died in 1905. Touching as the story is that
the two had quarreled and the younger woman was acting out her
grief, the notion of Mother's Day seems to have had several
precursors and to be of a piece with the trajectory of late 19th
century middle class white US feminism. In 17th century England,
Mothering Sunday had been observed on the fourth Sunday of Lent
by giving apprentices