This is the memory palace, I'm Nate de Mayo.

Anna Jarvis loved her mother, and because she loved her so much, mothers around the world

get flowers and cards and candy and hugs from their kids every May, which must have Anna

Jarvis spending in her grave.

She was born in 1864 in West Virginia to a woman whose name was also Anna Jarvis.

In her mother, Anna Maria, to her daughter's Anna Marie, was a remarkable woman.

The elder Anna was a feminist and a progressive and a bit of a socialist before any of those

words meant anything.

In Virginia in the middle of the 19th century, back before the phrase West Virginia meant

anything, she traveled throughout Appalachia, organizing women's groups, teaching them about

basic health, and how to demand workers' rights after teaching them what those rights were

in the first place.

During the Civil War, she brought women together to attend a second wounded soldiers, regardless

of whether they wore blue or gray.

After the war, with her baby Anna and her arms, she held meetings of mothers on both sides

in these proto-group therapy sessions of finding closure through shared grieving kind of

thing.

And she promoted something called Mother's Workday.

This wasn't Mother apostrophe S, so not your mother, but mothers as apostrophe, mother's

plural, a collective of mothers.

It was a radical idea.

Let's take a day, and it would be a day of demonstrations and political consciousness raising,

...