The History of Mother’s Day: From Global Peace to Greeting Cards 

Mother’s Day in the United States has a history all its own—and it’s more complicated than greeting cards might lead you to believe. There were repeated efforts to establish a Mother’s Day holiday and conflicting ideas about what it should stand for and how it should be observed. From a call for women to improve global policymaking and seek peace to a day to honor women’s work and role in the family, the history of the holiday reveals multiple insights into how mothers shape the world.   

Julia Ward Howe, best known as the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was an abolitionist, a women’s rights advocate, and a peace activist. In 1870, horrified by the death and destruction she had witnessed during the Civil War and concerned by the Franco-Prussian war unfolding abroad, Howe issued what has come to be known as her “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” originally called an “Appeal to womanhood throughout the world.” In it, Howe urged the creation of an international body of women who could find ways to avoid war and bloodshed:  

“I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed … to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”  

When that didn’t happen, Howe sought to establish an annual Mother’s Day for Peace, to be celebrated in June. That did happen in a few places, for a while.  

The version of Mother’s Day celebrated today is more directly rooted in the work of Ann Jarvis and her daughter, Anna Jarvis, who established the holiday to honor her mother. Frustratingly for the younger Jarvis, most people don’t celebrate it today the way she intended.    

Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis (1832–1905) bore more than a dozen children. Most of the children died from diseases such as diphtheria or measles, which were common during her day in the Appalachian area of Virginia (later West Virginia) where she lived. Jarvis worked hard in her community to try to help other mothers and families avoid the tragedies she had suffered. Part of a national public health movement populated in large part by women reformers, Jarvis organized “Mothers’ Work Clubs” and promoted special “Mother’s Work Days,” when women would collaboratively collect trash and undertake other projects to improve local environmental conditions and their neighbors’ understanding of hygiene.   

The focus of Jarvis’ work changed when war struck. Her region was deeply divided by the Civil War. Local soldiers fought on both sides of the conflict, and guerilla warfare was rampant. Jarvis insisted that the women’s groups she organized help both Confederate and Union troops who were sick or wounded, and she worked to promote peace and unity following the war. In 1868, despite threats of violence, she organized a “Mother’s Friendship Day” to bring families from both sides of the war together to try to restore a sense of community. It’s possible that Howe’s proclamation two years later was inspired by Jarvis; the two knew each other. At the very least, Jarvis and Howe shared the belief that women—and especially mothers—were best suited to bring people together with a goal of peace.   

After Ann Jarvis’ death, her daughter, Anna Jarvis (1864–1948), set out to honor her mother’s legacy by establishing a national Mothers’ Day on the second Sunday in May, the day her mother had died. Anna, who never married or had children of her own, did not focus the holiday on peace activism but on the idea of honoring one’s own mother. She chose white carnations as an emblem and urged people to write heartfelt letters of gratitude to their mothers (in Anna Jarvis’ eyes, sending a pre-printed card didn’t count). Anna succeeded in her quest for official recognition, and President Wilson issued a proclamation of the first national Mother’s Day just before the start of World War I in 1914.   

Anna Jarvis, however, soon grew discontented as she noted increasing commercialization of the celebration. What she had wanted to be an earnest “holy day” had become, in her eyes, a crass holiday benefitting florists and greeting card companies more than honoring the mothering work done by women. Anna was so distraught over the way Americans observed the holiday she had worked hard to establish that she started a petition to have it recalled in 1943. Five years later she died penniless in a sanitarium where her bills were paid by the same greeting card companies and florists she despised.    

Mother’s Day provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on and honor the role of mothers in our own families and in the rich and complicated history of our nation.  

Further Reading:  

• Antolini, Katharine Lane, Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother's Day. West Virginia University Press, 2014.  

• Howe, Julia Ward, "Appeal to womanhood throughout the world", An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera. Library of Congress, 1870.   

• Leigh, Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton University Press, 1997.