Historians reveal the individual who established Mother’s Day.
Anna Jarvis, the daughter of Ann Reeves Jarvis, organized a memorial service for her mother on the second Sunday in May 1907 in Grafton, West Virginia. The event was followed by a larger public ceremony in Philadelphia the same year, where white carnations were distributed to families. Jarvis’s efforts led the governor of West Virginia to declare Mother’s Day an official state holiday in 1910 and President Woodrow Wilson to establish it as a national holiday in 1914. She also founded the Mother’s Day International Association in 1912 and secured trademarks for the name and date of the holiday.
After its adoption, Jarvis opposed commercial exploitation of the holiday, launching boycotts against florists and threatening legal action against organizations that planned large public celebrations. She publicly criticized political figures, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, for using Mother’s Day in fundraising campaigns. By the 1940s, her opposition to the holiday’s commercialization prompted her to withdraw from public life.
In 1944 Jarvis was admitted to the Marshall Square Sanitarium, where she remained until her death. She died on May 12, 1948, at age 84, alone and without personal income. Jarvis had never earned money from the holiday she founded.