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.

Jarvis was very intentional about the name of her holiday. It’s Mother’s Day — as in one mom. The way Jarvis put it, Mother’s Day is a day to honor “the best mother who ever lived, yours.” ...

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.

Anna Jarvis spent her life combating the day’s commercialism, disrupting candy conventions, hounding public officials—fighting her baby to save it.

Mother’s Day ain’t what it used to be. The family of Anna Jarvis, the holiday’s founder, are following in their ancestor’s footsteps — by refusing to recognize the controversial date.

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 ...

Meanwhile, Anna Jarvis’s Mother’s Day wasn’t the only celebration dedicated to mothers during this time. Writer, abolitionist, and suffragist Julia Ward Howe established “Mothers’ Peace ...

Anna Jarvis accuses first lady Eleanor Roosevelt of “crafty plotting” by using Mother’s Day in fundraising material for charities trying to combat high maternal and infant mortality rates.

While dining at a Philadelphia tearoom owned by her friend John Wanamaker, Anna Jarvis ordered a salad — then dumped it on the floor. Jarvis hated that the dish was called “Mother’s Day Salad,” named ...

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 ...