Today in History: Mother's Day

Happy Mother’s Day everyone! We owe this holiday to the hard work of Ann Jarvis and her daughter, Anna Jarvis. Ann struggled to make an official holiday to celebrate mothers as part of her work to reunite families after the Civil War. There were several local observances of Mother’s Day in the decades that followed (usually attached to the temperance movement or some other cause) but she died in 1905 without succeeding in making it a national movement. Her daughter, Anna, picked up the struggle in her honor and the first official Mother’s Day was celebrated on the second Sunday in May in 1908.