The creation of Mother's Day is attributed to Anna Jarvis, who wanted to honor her late mother -- who shared her name and had first helped organized a Mother's Friendship Day in the 1860s to reunite families torn apart in the Civil War.
Jarvis' mother wished to grow Mother's Friendship Day into an annual date to honor all mothers, but she died before that happened. So, in the early 1900s, Jarvis took up the cause and arranged a Mother's Day celebration at St. Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where her mom had taught Sunday school. It was held on the second Sunday in May, the closest Sunday to May 8, which was the date of her mom's death.
Jarvis later successfully campaigned for Mother's Day to gain national recognition. West Virginia's governor proclaimed it a holiday in 1910, and President Woodrow Wilson followed in 1914.
However, before Jarvis died in a sanitarium in 1948, she grew increasingly disturbed by how commercialized Mother's Day became. Today, Mother's Day spending is estimated to reach $23.1 billion, according to the National Retail Federation.
"Jarvis spent much of the rest of her life railing against the increasing commercialization of the holiday all over the world," according to a 2016 article published by Audrey Fischer in the Library of Congress Magazine. "Her protests, which began first with florists, escalated to arrests for public disturbances."
Mother's Day was always intended to be singular possessive because Jarvis wanted children to be able to use it to honor their individual mothers.
