13 Things You Didn't Know About Mother's Day

13 Things You Didn't Know About Mother's Day

- Lauren Cahn And Caroline Fanning

1 It was all started by a mum, of course.

Ann Reeves Jarvis arranged Mothers’ Friendship Day in West Virginia back in the 1860s, and she had a surprisingly serious purpose. A social activist (and mother of 13), Jarvis hoped the special day would quiet the seething animosity between the Union and Confederate soldiers, in addition to their families and neighbours, at the end of the American Civil War.

2 Her daughter took it very seri-ously too.

After Ann Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, Anna M. Jarvis, made it her mission to take Mother’s Day national. Anna never had kids, but you could say Mother’s Day was her baby. She campaigned for years against what she saw as its commercialization, from candy to store bought cards to a 1934 postage stamp. “If the American people are not willing to protect Mother’s Day from the hordes of money schemers that would overwhelm it with their schemes, then we shall cease having a Mother’s Day,” she wrote.

3 Tommy loved his mummy.

It was President Thomas Woodrow Wilson (Tommy to his family) who made Mother’s Day a national holiday in 1914, 26 years after his mother’s death. “I remember how I clung to her (a laughed-at mamma’s boy) till I was a great big fellow,” Wilson wrote in a letter to his wife, “but love of the best womanhood came to me and entered my heart through those apron-strings.”