Anna Jarvis founded the holiday, and the first formal Mother’s Day church service was held at her late mother’s church in Grafton, West Virginia. Jarvis’s mother, Ann Jarvis, had organized women’s groups to promote friendship and health, and Jarvis led a campaign to establish a holiday that recognized the importance of mothers to their families. Her efforts were successful. Within five years virtually every U.S. state was observing Mother’s Day, and in 1914 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday.
Jarvis, who died in 1948, spent the last years of her life trying to abolish the holiday, as a protest against its commercialization.
