Anna Jarvis trademarked the phrase “Second Sunday in May, Mother’s Day, Anna Jarvis, Founder” in 1912. The registration came during her campaign to secure national and international recognition for the holiday she had promoted.
Jarvis’s movement followed a memorial service held in 1908 at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia. She wanted Mother’s Day to be a personal day of appreciation, with families honoring their own mothers rather than celebrating motherhood as a generalized public abstraction.
The wording also reflects Jarvis’s insistence on the singular possessive “Mother’s.” She said the apostrophe signified each person honoring his or her own mother. In the same year as the trademark, she incorporated the Mother’s Day International Association.
Jarvis later became one of the holiday’s fiercest critics. As greeting-card, floral, and candy businesses commercialized the occasion, she argued that expensive purchases undermined the handwritten messages and personal affection she had intended.