President Wilson makes his first Mothers Day proclamation on May 9, 1914, after the U.S. Congress set the second Sunday of every May as the official Mothers Day celebration. By then most U.S. States were already celebrating Mother's Day.
Julia Ward Howe (1872), a key women's rights figure and participant in the American Woman Suffrage Association and Anna Jarvis (1907) are also credited for suggesting and promoting the idea. The custom developed of wearing a red or pink carnation to represent a living mother or a white carnation for a mother who was deceased. The modern American version of the holiday has been criticized for becoming too commercialized. Many other countries have a multi-century history of a day to celebrate mothers on different dates. More
