Esther Howland was a 19th‑century American artist and entrepreneur best known as the “mother of the American valentine” for popularizing ornate Valentine’s Day cards in the United States.

Who was Esther Howland?

  • Born in 1828 in Worcester, Massachusetts, into a family that owned a large book and stationery store, S.A. Howland & Sons.
  • Graduated from Mount Holyoke (then Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in 1847, one of the early generations of women to attend the school.
  • Died in 1904 at age 75, after a career that made her a nationally recognized figure in the greeting‑card trade, even if her name later faded from popular memory.

How did she change Valentine’s Day?

  • After receiving an elaborate English valentine in the late 1840s, she realized she could create similar but more affordable versions for the American market.
  • Using her father’s stationery connections, she sourced lace, fine paper, and decorative scraps from New York and Europe, then designed highly detailed, layered cards that stood out from simpler American valentines of the time.
  • Her designs helped shift Valentine’s Day from a modest exchange of notes into a booming commercial holiday, laying groundwork for today’s multibillion‑dollar greeting‑card industry.

Her business and innovations

  • She set up a small production “assembly line” in an upstairs room of her family home, employing local women to help copy and assemble cards at a time when only a small minority of women worked outside the home.
  • She incorporated her operation as the New England Valentine Company, which reportedly earned profits of over 100,000 dollars a year by around 1880 (roughly several million in today’s money).
  • Distinctive touches included layered lace paper, hidden or enclosed messages, painted silk, embossed lithographed ornaments, and three‑dimensional or pull‑tab elements that revealed verses.
  • To brand her products, she stamped an “H” and “N.E.V.Co.” on the back of cards, along with the price—an early example of consistent product branding in this niche.

Later life and legacy

  • In 1879 she merged her firm with a competitor, Edward Taft, and soon after the business was sold to the George C. Whitney Company, another Worcester card maker; she left the industry to care for her ailing father.
  • Despite suffering a knee injury that left her in a wheelchair, she remained a successful business owner for decades in an era with very limited roles for women in commerce.
  • Worcester became known as a “valentine capital” because of the industry she helped create, and the city still honors her; for example, the room where the City Council meets bears her name.
  • Modern profiles and histories now highlight her as a pioneering female entrepreneur who expanded both the aesthetics of valentines and the acceptance of women in leadership roles in business and the arts.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.