Anna Jarvis celebrated the first Mother’s Day when, on May 12, 1907, she held a memorial service honoring her late mother in Grafton, West Virginia. Jarvis’s mother, Ann, 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.
