Quiz: Mother’s Day began —

A. In 1858, when Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker, organized “Mother’s Work Days” to improve the sanitation and avert deaths from disease-bearing insects and seepage of polluted water.

B. In 1872, when Boston poet, pacifist and women’s suffragist Julia Ward Howe established a special day for mothers — and for peace — not long after the bloody Franco-Prussian War.

C. In 1905, when Ann Jarvis died. Her daughter, Anna, decided to memorialize her mother’s lifelong activism, and began a campaign that culminated in 1914 when Congress passed a Mother’s Day resolution.

The correct answer: All of the above.

Each woman and all of these events have contributed to the present occasion now celebrated on the second Sunday in May.

The cause of world peace was the impetus for Julia Ward Howe’s establishment, over a century ago, 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.” She believed, as any woman might, that it could have been settled without bloodshed. And, she wondered, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters 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 held successfully in Boston and elsewhere for several years, but eventually lost popularity and disappeared from public notice in the years preceding World War I.

Source: National Women’s History Alliance