Fathers Day

On a Sunday in May 1909, Sonora Smart Dodd sat in the Central Methodist Episcopal Church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a sermon in honour of Mother’s Day. The new observance was barely off the ground, and as the minister spoke Dodd found herself thinking not of her late mother but of her father. William Jackson Smart, a veteran of the American Civil War, had raised Sonora and her five brothers alone after his wife died in childbirth. The thought that struck her in that pew, that fathers deserved a day of their own, became the third Sunday in June that much of the world now keeps.

A daughter, a widower, and an idea

Sonora Louise Smart Dodd was born in Jenny Lind, Arkansas, on 18 February 1882, the eldest of six and the only girl. When her mother, Ellen, died in 1898 giving birth to her sixth child, Sonora was sixteen, and a great deal of the work of raising her younger brothers fell to her and to her father. William Smart’s quiet competence as a single parent on a rural Eastern Washington farm was, by every account, the direct inspiration for what his daughter went on to build.

Moved by the Mother’s Day sermon she had heard, Dodd approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance in 1910 with a proposal for a day honouring fathers. She suggested 5 June, her own father’s birthday. The Alliance, needing more time to prepare sermons, settled instead on the third Sunday of the month, and so the first Father’s Day was observed in Spokane on 19 June 1910. Dodd, who had trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, spent much of the rest of her long life promoting the cause; she died in Spokane in 1978 at the age of ninety-six.

The slow road to a holiday

What is striking about Father’s Day is how long it took to be accepted, especially compared with the rapid success of Mother’s Day. Anna Jarvis, who held the first Mother’s Day service in 1908, saw her observance made a national holiday by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, within just six years of campaigning. There is a grim postscript to that swift triumph: Jarvis spent the rest of her life fighting the commercialisation of her own creation, came to loathe the florists and card companies that profited from it, and was reportedly arrested in 1948 while protesting against a Mother’s Day celebration. Father’s Day, by contrast, was met from the start with suspicion and a good deal of mockery. Many men found the idea sentimental or saw in it the fingerprints of retailers eager to sell neckties and tobacco, and the resistance was real enough that the day stalled for decades. The irony is that the very commercialism Jarvis fought was, in Father’s Day’s case, part of what eventually carried it to acceptance.

The path to recognition was nonetheless studded with prominent supporters. The orator and politician William Jennings Bryan endorsed it. President Calvin Coolidge recommended its national observance in 1924 without making it official. The decisive steps came much later: President Lyndon B. Johnson issued a proclamation in 1966 designating the third Sunday of June, and President Richard Nixon signed the law that made Father’s Day a permanent national holiday in the United States in 1972, fully sixty-two years after that first Spokane celebration. There is a particular irony in Dodd having lived just long enough, into her nineties, to see the day she invented finally written into federal law.

Older roots and other dates

Dodd’s 1910 invention gave the modern, secular Father’s Day its shape, but the impulse to honour fathers reaches much further back, and the calendar reflects it. In Catholic tradition the feast of Saint Joseph, kept on 19 March, has long served as a day for fathers, and it remains the date of Father’s Day in countries such as Spain, Portugal and Italy. In Germany, Vatertag coincides with Ascension Day, forty days after Easter, and is marked as much by groups of men hauling wagons of beer through the countryside as by family sentiment. Thailand celebrates fathers on 5 December, the birthday of the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, and many participants wear yellow in his honour.

The geography becomes more tangled still further afield. Australia and New Zealand keep Father’s Day on the first Sunday of September, which falls in early spring below the equator rather than midsummer. Brazil celebrates Dia dos Pais on the second Sunday of August. In Nepal, the Hindu observance of Kushe Aunsi falls in late August or early September depending on the lunar calendar, and children honour their fathers by touching their feet and performing prayers, sometimes travelling to a sacred site to do so for a father who has died. Despite this variety, the third Sunday of June, the date the Spokane clergy settled on in 1910, has become the most widely shared, observed across the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, India, China, Japan and roughly eighty other countries, an unusually broad reach for a tradition that began with one woman and her widowed father.

Why it matters

It would be easy to dismiss the day as a greetings-card invention, and its early critics did exactly that. The more interesting case for it rests on what social research has gradually made clear about engaged fatherhood. Studies of child development have linked an involved, present father, or father figure, with better outcomes in children’s emotional regulation, academic attainment and later wellbeing. A day that nudges fathers towards reflection on their own role, and nudges everyone else towards valuing it, is doing something more useful than selling ties.

It is worth remembering, too, how recently the cultural picture of fatherhood has shifted. For most of the twentieth century the father was cast chiefly as the provider, a figure of authority and income who stood slightly apart from the daily work of raising children. The expansion of paternity leave across much of Europe, the rise of stay-at-home fathers, and a broad change in expectations have moved many fathers much closer to the centre of family life than William Jackson Smart’s contemporaries would have thought normal, even though he himself lived it out of necessity in 1898. Father’s Day has quietly tracked that change, growing from a celebration of distant providers into one of present, hands-on parents, which is perhaps why it has outlasted the scepticism that dogged its first sixty years.

The day has also widened well beyond its original frame. It now reaches the people who do fatherly work without the title: grandfathers, stepfathers, uncles, guardians, mentors and family friends. For those who have lost a father, the third Sunday of June carries a quieter weight, a fixed point in the year for remembrance rather than celebration. This breadth is not a dilution of Dodd’s idea so much as a fulfilment of it; she was, after all, honouring a man who took on a role that circumstances rather than expectation had handed him.

How it is kept

The customs are modest and centred on time. Families gather for shared meals, often a barbecue in the longer evenings of June, and children give cards and gifts, the handmade ones from the youngest holding a particular charm. The commercial side that early sceptics feared did indeed arrive: neckties, tools and gadgets became the affectionate clichés of the day, given with a knowing smile that acknowledges the joke. Many simply use the occasion as licence to do something the father in question actually enjoys, whether a round of golf, a long walk or an afternoon left undisturbed.

These quieter family observances sit alongside the more food-driven dates that crowd the same stretch of the calendar; Father’s Day in the United States falls in a season busy with occasions like National Spumoni Day and National Guacamole Day, reflecting how American observances so often gather around a shared table. The constant across all of it is presence rather than expenditure.

Fun facts

• Sonora Smart Dodd originally wanted Father’s Day on 5 June, her father’s birthday; the only reason it lands in late June is that the local clergy needed extra time to write their sermons.
• Father’s Day was officially recognised nationally in the United States a full fifty-eight years after Mother’s Day, despite both being conceived within a few years of each other.
• In Germany, Vatertag is essentially a male holiday for hiking and drinking, and statistics consistently show a sharp spike in alcohol-related incidents on the day.
• President Coolidge endorsed Father’s Day in 1924 but pointedly declined to issue a formal proclamation, reportedly wary of appearing to favour his own popularity.
• Father’s Day is one of the busiest days of the year for the catering and restaurant trade in the United States, and historically one of the highest-volume days for collect telephone calls, made by children ringing home.

A closing reflection

There is a tidy lesson buried in how grudgingly Father’s Day was accepted. The same culture that took instantly to honouring mothers spent six decades squirming at the thought of honouring fathers, as though sentiment of that kind sat awkwardly on men. That awkwardness has not entirely vanished, and perhaps it is part of what the day quietly works against. Sonora Dodd’s father never asked to be celebrated; he simply got on with raising six children because someone had to. The day she built in his memory says, in the end, that getting on with it deserves to be noticed too.