First attempts to establish a holiday for "Mother's Day" in the U.S. were mostly made by women's peace groups. At the time of the American Civil War a common activity was the meeting of groups of mothers whose sons had fought or died on the opposite sides. There were several limited observances in the 1870s and the 1880s but none achieved resonance beyond the local level.
In 1868 Ann Jarvis created a committee to establish a "Mother's Friendship Day" whose purpose was "to reunite families that had been divided during the Civil War", and she wanted to expand it into an annual memorial for mothers, but she died in 1905 before the celebration became popular. Her daughter Anna Jarvis would continue her mother's efforts.
In New York City, Julia Ward Howe led a "Mother's Day" anti-war observance on June 2, 1872, which was accompanied by a Mother's Day Proclamation. The observance continued in Boston for about 10 years under Howe's personal sponsorship, then died out.
Several years later a Mother's Day observance on May 13, 1877 was held in Albion, Michigan over a dispute related to the temperance movement. According to local legend, Albion pioneer Juliet Calhoun Blakeley stepped up to complete the sermon of the Rev. Myron Daughterty who was distraught because an anti-temperance group had forced his son and two other temperance advocates to spend the night in a saloon and become publicly drunk. From the pulpit Blakeley called on other mothers to join her. Blakeley's two sons, both traveling salesmen, were so moved that they vowed to return each year to pay tribute to her and embarked on a campaign to urge their business contacts to do likewise. At their urging, in the early 1880s, the Methodist Episcopal Church in Albion set aside the second Sunday in May to recognize the special contributions of mothers.
Frank E. Hering, President of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, made the first known public plea for "a national day to honor our mothers" in 1904.
In its present form, Mother's Day was established by Anna Marie Jarvis, following the death of her mother Ann Jarvis on May 9, 1905, with the help of Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker. A small service was held on May 12, 1907 in the Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia where Anna's mother had been teaching Sunday school. But the first "official" service was on May 10, 1908 in the same church, accompanied by a larger ceremony in the Wanamaker Auditorium in the Wanamaker's store on Philadelphia. She then campaigned to establish Mother's Day first as a U.S. national holiday and then later as an international holiday.
The holiday was declared officially by the state of West Virginia in 1910, and the rest of states followed quickly. . This was due to the existince of Father's Day before. On May 8, 1914, the U.S. Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day and requesting a proclamation. On May 9, 1914 President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother's Day as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.
In 1934, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a stamp commemorating the holiday.
In May 2008 the U.S. House of Representatives voted twice on a resolution commemorating Mother's Day, the first one being unanimous (with 21 members not voting). The Grafton's church, where the first celebration was held, is now the International Mother's Day Shrine and is a National Historic Landmark.
Carnations have come to represent Mother's Day, since Anna Jarvis delivered 500 of them at its first celebration in 1908. Many religious services held later copied the custom of giving away carnations. This also started the custom of wearing a carnation on Mother's Day. The founder, Anna Jarvis, chose the carnation because it was the favorite flower of her mother. In part due to the shortage of white carnations, and in part due to the efforts to expand the sales of more types of flowers in Mother's Day, the florists promoted wearing a red carnation if your mother was living, or a white one if she was dead; this was tirelessly promoted until it made its way into the popular observations at churches.
Commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant after nine years of the first official Mother's Day, hat Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become and spent all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration.
Later commercial and other exploitations of the use of Mother's Day infuriated Anna and she made her criticisms explicitly known throughout her time. She criticized the practice of purchasing greeting cards, which she saw as a sign of being too lazy to write a personal letter. She was arrested in 1948 for disturbing the peace while protesting against the commercialization of Mother's Day, and she finally said that she "wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control ...".
Mother's Day continues to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions.
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