A Mothers’ Day celebration was held in Boston in 1872 at the suggestion of abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward Howe, writer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

In the following decades, numerous Mother’s Day efforts sprang up.

One was in 1904, by the administrator of the University of Notre Dame, Frank Hering, After observing students sending penny postcards to their mothers, he proposed “setting aside one day in the year as a nationwide memorial to the memories of mothers and motherhood,” writing:

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