After one lecture in 1876, Ann Reeves Jarvis prayed that somebody would create a day commemorating mothers for their service for humanity, Antolini said. Twelve-year-old Anna Jarvis remembered that.

In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill recognizing Jarvis’ Mother’s Day as a national holiday. If Anna Jarvis hated Mother's Day back then, she would despise it now.

Not if you’re Anna Jarvis, the woman who founded Mother’s Day back in the early 1900s, then barnstormed all around the nation until President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1914 that the second ...

An undated photo of Anna Jarvis, from Grafton, West Virginia, who promoted and achieved the proclamation of Mother's Day as a national holiday, in honor of her mother, Anna Marie Reeves Jarvis.

The family of Anna Jarvis, the holiday’s founder, are following in their ancestor’s footsteps — by refusing to recognize the controversial date. Jarvis, born in 1864, wanted moms to have a ...

Twelve-year-old Anna Jarvis remembered that. Her mother died in 1905, and Jarvis, then in her 40s, promised at her gravesite that she’d be the one to answer her prayer.

Mother’s Day formally began on May 10, 1908, when Anna Jarvis honored her late mother, Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis, at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, and at a Wanamaker ...

In the years that followed the establishment of Mother's Day, Jarvis became disenchanted with what she saw as the overcommercialization of the holiday. It had strayed far from her original vision.

Anna Marie Jarvis lobbied for more than a decade to have her nation remember mothers, in honor of her own mother's wishes. Then, she fought to end it. At the end of the 19th century, her mother ...

And, on May 10, 1908, Jarvis arranged for 500 white carnations, her mom’s favorite flower, to be handed out in a ceremony at the Grafton, W.Va., church where her mother had taught Sunday school.

Her letters were signed “Anna Jarvis, Founder of Mother’s Day.” “It became a part of her identity,” the historian said. “It was completely tied up in her ego.” The fight that consumed Jarvis was waged ...