The grief of watching eight of her children die before they reached age 7 led Ann Reeves Jarvis to reach out to other women in her poor Appalachian community in the 1850s to organize mothers’ clubs.

It was Mrs. Jarvis’ fight to combat high infant mortality in West Virginia, her mobilization of brigades of Union and Confederate mothers to care for each other’s wounded sons, and her efforts to fight poverty that led her daughter, Anna Jarvis, to work obsessively to get Congress to proclaim the anniversary of her mother’s death as Mother’s Day.