Anna Marie Jarvis worked to get Mother's Day officially proclaimed. When Ann Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, Anna, began a campaign to memorialize her mother's lifelong activism that culminated in 1914 when Congress passed a Mother's Day resolution.

The first official Mother's Day was May 9, 1914, according to Library of Congress records.

President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the day to be one for expressing public "reverence" for mothers.

West Virginia native Anna Marie Jarvis is considered to be the driving force behind the campaign, which she developed in memory of her mother, Anna Reeves Jarvis, who died in 1905.

The elder Jarvis, known as Mother Jarvis, established the Mothers Day Work Clubs in the 1850s.

Among other things, these clubs nursed soldiers on both sides of the Civil War, advocated for better sanitation, and worked toward improving individual health.

The National Women's History Project also credits Julia Ward Howe, a Boston poet, pacifist and women’s suffragist, for the creation of Mother's Day in America. According to the organization's website, www.nwhp.org, she established a special day for mothers and for peace in 1872, not long after the Franco-Prussian War.

The cause of world peace was the impetus for Howe's establishment of a special day for mothers. Following unsuccessful efforts to pull together an international pacifist conference after the Franco-Prussian War, Howe began to think of a global appeal to women.

"While the war was still in progress," she wrote, she keenly felt the "cruel and unnecessary character of the contest," which she believed could have been settled without bloodshed. "Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters," she wrote, "to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?"

Howe's version of Mother's Day, which served as an occasion for advocating peace, was observed in Boston and elsewhere for several years, but eventually lost popularity and disappeared from public notice before World War I.

For the elder Anna Jarvis, community improvement by mothers was only a beginning. Throughout the Civil War she organized women's brigades, asking her workers to do all they could without regard for which side their men had chosen.

In 1868, she took the initiative to heal the bitter rifts between her Confederate and Union neighbors.

The younger Anna Marie Jarvis was only 12 in 1878 when she listened to her mother teach a Sunday school lesson about mothers in the Bible. "I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mother's day," the senior Jarvis said. "There are many days for men, but none for mothers."

Following her mother's death, Anna Marie Jarvis embarked on a campaign. She poured out letters to men of prominence and enlisted considerable help from Philadelphia merchant John Wannamaker.

By May of 1907, a Mother's Day service had been arranged on the second Sunday in May at the Methodist Church in Grafton, W.Va., where Mother Jarvis had taught. The custom spread. The governor of West Virginia proclaimed Mother's Day in 1912; Pennsylvania did the same in 1913.

The next year saw the Congressional resolution, which was signed by President Woodrow Wilson.

In today's world, mothers are an evolving demographic.

Roughly 66% of the 23.5 million women who worked in 2018 with children under 18 worked full-time, according the U.S. Census Bureau.

About 40% of all working mothers in 2018 worked in education, health care or social assistance.

Information was gathered from the Library of Congress, National Women's History Project and U.S. Census Bureau websites.