Lamberts thought this day emerged from a custom of mother worship in ancient Greece, which kept a festival to Cybele, a great mother of Greek gods.{Encyclopædia Britannica|(1959)Vol.15,p. 849} This festival was held around the Vernal Equinox around Asia Minor and eventually in Rome itself from the Ides of March (15 March) to 18 March.

The ancient Romans also had another holiday, Matronalia, that was dedicated to Juno, though mothers were usually given gifts on this day.

In Europe there were several long standing traditions where a specific Sunday was set aside to honor motherhood and mothers such as Mothering Sunday. Mothering Sunday celebrations are part of the liturgical calendar in several Christian denominations, including Anglicans, and in the Catholic calendar is marked as Laetara Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent to honour the Virgin Mary and your "mother" church (the main church of the area). Historians think that children who served in houses were given a day off on that date so they could visit their families. The children would pick wild flowers along the way to place them on the church or to give them to their mothers as gifts.

International Women's Day was celebrated for the first time in 28 February 1909, in the US,^[2] by which time Anna Jarvis had already begun her national campaign in the US. It is now celebrated in many countries on March 8.

The "Mother's Day Proclamation" by Julia Ward Howe was one of the early calls to celebrate Mother's Day in the United States. Written in 1870, Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation was a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. The Proclamation was tied to Howe's feminist belief that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.