If we discount the ancient festivals to the goddesses Rhea (Greece) and Cybele (Rome), and begin with the more recent history of Mother’s Day, we might find ourselves in England in the 1600s.
By then, early Christians had condensed the festivals mentioned above into what was called Mothering Sunday.
In the U.S. in 1872, writer-activist-lecturer Julia Ward Howe became the first to call for a national celebration called Mothers Day. [She didn’t use the apostrophe.]
Howe called for It to be held on June 2 and it would be dedicated to peace as a response to the war that broke out between France and Germany in 1870.
But although Howe was well-born, well-educated, and well-known as a poet and the famous author of the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” she would not become the founder of the celebration in America.
That honor would go to Anna Jarvis.
Unlike Howe, who was well-known, had been married many years and was the mother of six children, Anna Jarvis never married and never had children. Still, she gave birth to the holiday and is recognized as its founder.
And the celebration of mothers wasn’t Anna’s idea.
It was the idea of her mother, Mrs. Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis, an activist and social worker, who felt that all mothers, living and dead, should be honored.
After her mother’s death in 1905, Anna resolved to fulfill her mother’s wish.
To honor her mother, she began by sending white carnations, her mother’s favorite flower, to their church in Grafton, West Virginia.
Along with a group of supporters, she wrote letters to influential people to lobby for a Mother’s Day holiday. The success of their efforts was clearly apparent by 1911. Almost every state in the union had adopted Mother’s Day as an official celebration.
Because of the growing acceptance of the holiday, President Woodrow Wilson signed a joint resolution designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day on May 8, 1914.
