Why Is Mother’s Day on the Second Sunday in May?

Mother’s Day became a national holiday in 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson called on Americans to honor mothers on the second Sunday in May. His proclamation came after decades of women campaigning for official recognition for the holiday. Although united in their cause, early advocates disagreed on the date.

The first national Mother’s Day took place on May 10, 1914. Wilson’s Proclamation 1268 directed Americans to mark the second Sunday in May with displays of the U.S. flag “as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.”

Wilson’s national observance followed years of advocacy by women. Anna Jarvis, for one, organized early Mother’s Day services in West Virginia and Philadelphia. Julia Ward Howe, a Boston-based poet, suffragist and abolitionist, called for a post-Civil War “Mother’s Day for Peace” in her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation. Most states were already celebrating the holiday by the early 1910s but not always on the same day. President Wilson unified the celebration, officially setting the date as the second Sunday in May.

Howe proposed June as the timing for her proposed Mother’s Day for Peace, which gained traction in Boston and beyond in the late 19th century, according to the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. Howe might have been inspired by Jarvis’ mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, the museum adds, whose 1868 “Mother’s Friendship Day” was organized to reunite families divided by the Civil War.

Another early advocate, a Kentucky teacher named Mary Towles Sasseen, promoted an observance in schools to honor mothers in 1887. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, she suggested April 20, her own mother’s birthday, and traveled nationally to promote the idea. Several schools adopted her proposal, and the Kentucky legislature declared her the “originator of the idea of the Celebration of Mother’s Day” in 1926, the almanac adds.

The second Sunday in May reflects Anna Jarvis’ choice. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, Jarvis held a memorial service for her mother in May 1907, followed by a broader Mother’s Day service at a West Virginia church on May 10, 1908, the second Sunday of that May. “Thus was born the idea that the second Sunday in May be set aside to honor every mother, whether living or deceased,” the almanac reports.

Successive presidents kept the tradition going. Harry S. Truman spoke of “the debt of gratitude” owed to mothers in 1946. John F. Kennedy called the American mother “vital” to raising good citizens in 1963. And Ronald Reagan stated in 1988 that, “Mother’s Day affords us an opportunity to meet one of life’s happiest duties.”

There was a proclamation pause in 1935, however. According to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Roosevelt felt the holiday was already firmly rooted and said tributes to American mothers should “come simply and spontaneously from our hearts.”