4.5 • 670 Ratings
🗓️ 10 May 2019
⏱️ 3 minutes
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0:00.0 | Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered. |
0:08.6 | Each year, on the second Sunday of May, we celebrate mothers, often with flowers, sometimes candy, |
0:17.0 | whatever it takes to show our moms that we care. And no one would hate that more than the woman who invented Mother's Day. |
0:27.1 | This is the story of Anna Jarvis, who spent years fighting to create Mother's Day and then went broke, trying to protect it. |
0:39.3 | Anna Jarvis was born in West Virginia, the daughter of a Sunday school teacher |
0:41.3 | who helped start clubs to teach women |
0:43.3 | how to care for their children. |
0:46.3 | After one lecture, |
0:47.3 | Jarvis's mother prayed that someone would create a day |
0:50.3 | commemorating mothers for their service to humanity. |
0:55.3 | Twelve-year-old Anna never forgot that. |
0:58.8 | When her mother died, Jarvis promised at her gravesite that she'd answered the prayer. |
1:05.8 | Jarvis embarked on a relentless letter-writing campaign to persuade governors of every state to declare the second |
1:12.9 | Sunday of May as Mother's Day. |
1:15.4 | That was the closest Sunday to her mother's death anniversary. |
1:19.3 | The first Mother's Day service was held one morning in 1908. |
1:23.5 | And in 1914, after Anna had written so many letters that she had to buy a second house to |
1:28.5 | store them in, Congress finally passed a law, and President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation |
1:34.7 | declaring the first National Mother's Day. Jarvis had won. Or did she? It certainly wasn't the holiday she'd had in mind. |
1:47.4 | And that made her furious. |
1:49.7 | So furious that Jarvis spent the rest of her life railing against flower shop owners, card makers, and the candy industry for profiting off the holiday. |
1:59.9 | She felt they were trying to take it from her. |
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