n 1915, President Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday in May a national holiday honoring mothers At the time, the country was involved in fighting World War I, yet Wilson's White House was surrounded by suffragists holding signs demanding the right to vote. The women were considered traitors by many and Wilson's praise of mothers might well have been meant as a distraction.

Before 1915, the holiday was celebrated as a testament to women's peace-making activities. There are two different and complementary versions of how this came about. One version sets the first Mother's Day in West Virginia after the Civil War. There, Anna M. Jarvis had participated in Mother's Work Days, in which women's brigades worked to improve critical community sanitation. In 1868, Jarvis established Mother's Friendship Day, relying on women to ease tensions between North and South once the war was over.

The second version, also prompted by the Civil War, takes peace activism a step further. Julia War Howe of Boston, who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," wanted women to band together internationally to abolish all wars. Her Mothers' Peace Day celebrations took place for several years as Boston marches and city after city adopted the tradition until the end of the First World War.