In a few short weeks families across America will be sitting down to dinners or brunches and buying bouquets of flowers and cards to celebrate the women in their lives who have the title “mother.”

Whether they are birth mothers, adoptive mothers, first-time moms, grandmothers or women who have assumed the role of mother, these women will be honored and acknowledged for the hard work, sacrifice and love they give unfailing to their families.

But how did this day of maternal celebration come to be and why?

According to the official website on the history of Mother’s Day, www.historybymail.com, the origins of Mother’s Day date back to the 1850s, pre-Civil War when a woman named Ann Reeves Jarvis started what she called women’s clubs in West Virginia.

The purpose of these clubs was to educate people on disease prevention and hygiene to combat childhood diseases and mortality. During the Civil War, these women treated wounded soldiers of the Union and Confederate armies.

After the war ended, in 1868, Jarvis attempted to organize these clubs to bring together both sides in an attempt to soothe fractured feelings, which still existed because of the Confederates’ defeat, through the power of motherhood. She called the event “Mother’s Friendship Day.”

It’s unknown how successful her event was.

Two years later, the woman who authored the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” activist and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, called all mothers together for a “Mother’s Peace Day.”

After Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter Anna Jarvis was inundated with requests to continue her mother’s work toward establishing a national Mother’s Day holiday.

In 1908 she organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration in St. Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, on May 10. Following the success in Grafton, Anna started a national write-in campaign asking people to write to their local newspapers and politicians urging them to make Mother’s Day an official holiday. Her plan was semi-successful.

Within a few short years’ towns, churches, families and even some states were celebrating Mother’s Day annually, but it still was not a designated national holiday.

On May 10, 1913, Congress passed a resolution for federal officials to wear a white carnation (Ann Reese Jarvis’s favorite flower) in observance of Mother’s Day. The next year Congress passed a law designation the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day and requiring a proclamation from the president.

The following day, President Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation establishing the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

Happy Mother’s Day!

In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation establishing the second Saturday in May as Mother’s Day.

This year, Mother’s Day is Sunday, May 14.