Celebrating Fathers: A Journey Through the Tradition of Father’s Day

In the spring of 1909, a young woman named Sonora Smart Dodd sat in Central Methodist Episcopal Church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a Mother’s Day sermon. Her own mother had died in childbirth years earlier, and Sonora had watched her father, William Jackson Smart — a veteran of the American Civil War — raise her and her five brothers alone on a farm. As the sermon praised the sacrifices of mothers, one thought took hold of her: fathers deserved a day of their own. That single, personal impulse, born of grief and gratitude in one church pew, is the origin of the holiday now marked across much of the world.

Sonora Smart Dodd and the first Father’s Day

Dodd took her idea to the Spokane Ministerial Alliance. She proposed 5 June — her father’s birthday — for the first observance, but the ministers said they needed more time to prepare their sermons, and settled instead on the third Sunday of June. So it was that on 19 June 1910, Spokane held what is generally recognised as the first Father’s Day, with local churches delivering sermons on the duties and importance of fatherhood. It was a strictly local affair, driven by one determined daughter, with no guarantee it would outlast the season.

That it survived at all owed much to Dodd’s persistence over the following decades, and to a slow drift of public sentiment. The idea was not universally welcomed, and for a long stretch it looked as though it might quietly fade. There was a genuine strain of scepticism that Father’s Day was little more than a commercial contrivance — an attempt by retailers to manufacture a second gift-giving occasion to match the success of Mother’s Day. That suspicion, oddly, would shadow the holiday’s path to national recognition for the better part of a century.

A long, reluctant road to national recognition

The contrast with Mother’s Day is telling. Mother’s Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1914, only a few years after its founding. Father’s Day, despite emerging at almost the same moment, took nearly six decades to reach the same status — and the delay was not accidental. Politicians were wary of appearing to endorse a holiday widely seen as an invention of the necktie and greeting-card trades, and several early attempts to formalise it stalled in Congress.

Momentum built gradually. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued a proclamation designating the third Sunday of June as Father’s Day. Full permanence arrived only in 1972, when President Richard Nixon signed the legislation that made Father’s Day a permanent national holiday in the United States, more than sixty years after that first Spokane observance. Sonora Smart Dodd, who died in 1978 at the age of ninety-six, lived to see the day she had conceived as a grieving young woman finally written into federal law.

Honouring fathers long before the holiday

The impulse behind Father’s Day is, of course, far older than 1910. Perhaps the most charming piece of evidence comes from ancient Mesopotamia. A Babylonian clay tablet, attributed to a young man named Elmesu and dated by some accounts to around four thousand years ago, is said to carry a message to his father wishing him good health and a long life. Whether or not every detail of that tablet’s popular retelling is precise, it captures something durable: the desire of children to honour their fathers is not a modern marketing idea but a very old human one.

Catholic tradition offers another thread. In parts of Europe, fathers had long been honoured on 19 March, the feast of Saint Joseph, husband of Mary and — in Christian tradition — the earthly father of Jesus. This is why several predominantly Catholic countries, including Spain, Portugal, and Italy, still celebrate Father’s Day on 19 March rather than in June. The modern American holiday, then, did not invent the honouring of fathers so much as give a secular, fixed-date shape to an instinct that older cultures had already expressed in their own ways.

How the day travelled and changed

Once established, Father’s Day spread unevenly and adapted to local calendars and customs, which is why its date is far from universal. The United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and many other countries observe it on the third Sunday of June, following the American model. Australia and New Zealand mark it on the first Sunday of September, their calendars shifted to the southern hemisphere’s seasons. Germany folds its celebration into Vatertag, held on Ascension Day, forty days after Easter — an occasion that in practice often involves groups of men taking hiking trips together, sometimes with a wagon of beer in tow. Thailand traditionally celebrates on 5 December, the birthday of the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who was regarded as the father of the nation.

These variations are a reminder that a holiday is never simply exported intact. Each country grafts it onto its own history, faith, and climate, and the resulting patchwork of dates means that on almost any given month of the year, some corner of the world is honouring its fathers. The Thai association of fatherhood with the monarch, the German linking of it to a religious feast and an outdoor ramble, the Catholic tie to Saint Joseph — each tells you as much about the place as about fatherhood itself.

The changing shape of fatherhood

Part of what makes Father’s Day interesting to revisit is that the thing it celebrates has itself been transformed since 1910. William Jackson Smart, the widowed farmer who inspired the holiday, was in his time an anomaly — a father raising six children alone, in an era when child-rearing was assumed to be maternal work and a man’s role was defined almost entirely by provision. The holiday was, in part, an argument that such fathers deserved recognition precisely because they had stepped outside the expected division of labour.

A century on, the anomaly has become far more ordinary. Involved fatherhood — the hands-on parent present at bedtimes and school gates, sharing the domestic load rather than merely funding it — is now the aspiration rather than the exception across much of the world. Research into child development has steadily strengthened the case that fathers’ active involvement matters in its own right, not as a substitute for maternal care but as a distinct contribution. Single fathers, stepfathers, adoptive fathers, and same-sex parents have widened the definition further still. The June holiday now stretches to cover a diversity of father figures that Sonora Smart Dodd, honouring one very traditional widower, could hardly have anticipated — which is arguably a sign of the idea’s health rather than its dilution.

There is a quieter point here too. Because fatherhood was historically wrapped up in stoicism and provision, men have often been slower to speak openly about the emotional weight of it — the anxieties, the sense of inadequacy, the grief. A day set aside to honour fathers is, at its best, also a small licence to talk about what fatherhood actually costs and gives, rather than treating it as a role to be silently performed.

Fun facts

• The first Father’s Day was held on 19 June 1910 in Spokane, but its founder had originally wanted 5 June, her father’s birthday; the ministers needed more preparation time.
• Mother’s Day became a US national holiday in 1914, yet Father’s Day did not gain the same permanent status until 1972 — a gap of nearly six decades.
• Suspicion that the holiday was a commercial invention genuinely slowed its official recognition, with politicians reluctant to be seen endorsing a “greeting-card” occasion.
• Spain, Portugal, and Italy celebrate Father’s Day on 19 March, the feast of Saint Joseph, rather than in June.
• In Germany, Vatertag coincides with Ascension Day and is often marked by all-male hiking excursions, frequently accompanied by a cart of beer.

A closing reflection

The most affecting thing about Father’s Day is how little it began as a “thing” at all. It was not decreed by a government or dreamed up in a boardroom; it started with one woman’s specific, private wish to honour one specific man who had raised six children alone. Everything that followed — the decades of political hesitation, the commercial anxieties, the eventual federal signature — was the world slowly catching up to a feeling Sonora Smart Dodd already had in a Spokane pew in 1909. That is worth remembering when the day rolls around freighted with ties and greeting cards: underneath the commerce and the neckties is a genuinely human impulse, far older than Babylon itself, to say thank you before it is too late. It belongs to the same family of remembrance-through-celebration as Juneteenth’s enduring reckoning with freedom and family, and it honours the kind of quietly outsized personal legacy that also runs through the story of Dolly Parton — proof that one person’s devotion can outlast them by generations.