Born in Grafton, West Virginia, on May 1, 1864, Anna Jarvis was of a prosperous family. She was educated at Mary Baldwin College. She emerged into public life in 1907, when, following a memorial service in May of that year for her late mother, she began a one-woman campaign to have one day a year set aside in honor of mothers. (Others had had similar ideas; as early as 1872 Julia Ward Howe suggested it.) On the second Sunday in May 1908, churches in Grafton and Philadelphia, where Jarvis then lived, held observances honoring mothers, and the custom of wearing carnations on that day was begun then. A tireless letter-writing campaign directed at state governors and legislatures and at congressmen resulted in Mother╒s Day observances being established in nearly every state by 1913, and in May 1914 President Woodrow Wilson signed a joint resolution of Congress recommending the observance of Mother╒s Day by government offices. The next year the President was authorized to proclaim a national Mother╒s Day each year on the second Sunday of May.
Incorporating herself as the Mother╒s Day International Association, Anna Jarvis extended her efforts to other nations. The volume of her correspondence was such that at length she was forced to buy the house next door simply for storage. At one time it was estimated that mother╒s days were being observed in 43 countries. The commercialization of Mother╒s Day by florists, confectioners, and greeting card firms outraged her, and she devoted much of the rest of her life, and her modest inheritance, to the largely unavailing attempt to maintain the purity of the holiday. Her threat of a lawsuit in 1923 did succeed in preventing a planned commercial celebration of Mother╒s Day in New York City. Her health broke down completely in 1943, and she spent her last years in a sanatorium in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where she died on November 24, 1948.
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